Ford CEO's personal Chinese EV exposes its tech gap

Outside of Ford's Dearborn headquarters, sits a car that was not built by a car company. Jim Farley, Ford's president and chief executive officer, drives it by choice, and has done so for well over a year. Reported by the YouTube channel Sam's POV - a digital series that tracks major developments in artificial intelligence, productivity tools, and modern business technology - Farley's sequence of on-the-record admissions about the vehicle form a portrait of a company in an uncomfortable confrontation with its own competitive position.

The car is the Xiaomi SU7. Xiaomi is a Chinese consumer electronics company, best known internationally for its smartphones, and the SU7, launched in 2024, was its first vehicle. Approximately eighteen months ago, Farley flew one from Shanghai to Chicago.

He had not been working alone in this endeavour: he had asked his management team to select the five best Chinese electric vehicles available, had them shipped to the United States, driven to Dearborn, and put into regular use. Of the five, Farley chose the SU7 as his own.

He has not been willing to return it since.

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The phone that learned to drive

What unsettled Farley is not simply that a Chinese technology company had entered the car market. It is the calibre of what it had built. According to Sam's POV's analysis of Farley's public comments, he has described the SU7's interface as feeling like an Apple product, noting that the vehicle identifies him through facial recognition without requiring any initial pairing process.

In its performance configuration, the car accelerates from 0 to 100 km/h in approximately three seconds, available at the press of a button. And it retails in China at a price roughly $20,000 less than Ford's own Mustang Mach-E when comparing equivalent mid-range trims - the SU7 begins at approximately $30,000, while a comparable Mach-E Premium sits between $42,000 and $45,000.

That pricing gap is as symbolic as it is financial. Xiaomi carries none of the legacy overhead that weighs on a century-old manufacturer. It arrived in the car business without inherited engine architecture, without a dealer network built around combustion, and without decades of accumulated compromise baked into its product development process.

The SU7 was, in industrial terms, a first attempt. In 2024, it outsold Ford's entire electric vehicle portfolio in China - by a significant margin.

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The engineer's diagnosis

To understand why Farley has been so unusually candid, the coverage draws attention to the figure he brought in to assess the damage. Doug Field joined Ford in 2021 as chief advanced technology and embedded systems officer. He came from Apple, where he had led the company's special projects group, and before that had served as senior vice president of engineering at Tesla, where he was instrumental in bringing the Model 3 to production.

He is, in other words, one of the small number of people alive who has had a senior engineering role at both of the companies that define the software-first approach to vehicles.

Field did not arrive at Dearborn to be celebrated. According to Sam's POV's account of Farley's public statements, Field walked Ford's manufacturing floors, examined the parts release system, reviewed the IT architecture, and assessed the CAD tooling. He then reported his findings to Farley directly. Ford was 25 years behind. Farley has confirmed this figure in multiple public appearances. Field is reported, in Sam's POV's analysis, to have told him directly: 'you can't compete with BYD.'

It is worth noting that this precise formulation is Sam's POV's characterisation of Farley's broader public commentary rather than a documented verbatim exchange between the two executives. The substance, however, is consistent with everything Farley has said publicly.

He has described Ford's teardown of a Tesla Model 3 as "shocking." He told one podcast audience (Office Hours: Business Edition podcast, released on 12 November 2025): "I was very humbled when we took apart the first Model 3 Tesla and started to take apart the Chinese vehicles. When we took them apart, it was shocking what we found." He has called China's progress in electrification the most humbling thing he has witnessed in his career.

The logic of admission

Sam's POV's central argument is that Farley's reluctance to return the SU7 is something more than professional due diligence. It is, the channel contends, a form of deferred reckoning. To give the car back would mean the comparison was over. And ending the comparison, the analysis suggests, would require a public answer that Ford does not yet possess.

This reading is harder to dismiss than it might initially seem. Ford reported revenues of $185 billion in 2024, making it one of the largest manufacturing enterprises in the United States. (Sam's POV cites a figure of $120 billion, which does not correspond to Ford's most recently reported annual revenue and may reflect an earlier reporting period or a different financial measure.)

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Farley leads this organisation, and he has acknowledged on the record that it cannot yet replicate a product built as a debut effort by a firm that had never previously manufactured a vehicle.

The competitive stakes extend well beyond the domestic American market, where Chinese EVs are currently excluded by prohibitive tariffs. In China itself, where Ford's only EV offering in 2024 was the Mustang Mach-E, the brand sold fewer than 1,000 units of that model. Xiaomi sold more than 130,000 SU7s in the same period.

The limits of candour

"Ford missed Japan. Ford missed South Korea. We can't miss China," Farley has said in a separate public appearance. "So the message to my team is if the CEO respects the competition from China, everyone in the company should."

What Sam's POV leaves the viewer with, and what the underlying facts bear out, is that Farley has chosen transparency over reassurance in a way that is unusual for the chief executive of a publicly traded industrial company. He has named the gap, estimated its magnitude, and hired someone from the technology industry to try to close it. What he has not yet done - and what no public statement has addressed with precision - is explain how a 25-year deficit in software architecture and manufacturing cost structure is closed within a competitive window that is measured in years rather than decades.

Farley still drives the Xiaomi SU7. It is still parked outside Ford's headquarters. And as Sam's POV observes with some precision, the reason he will not give it back may be the most honest thing he has said about the state of the American automotive industry.