Ford CEO Jim Farley said he was struck by a “shocking” discovery when digging into competitors’ vehicles, and it spurred him into taking action that would help the legacy carmaker compete with the likes of Tesla and Chinese upstarts.
When taking apart competitors’ vehicles, as is standard practice in the automobile industry, Farley said the company found Ford’s Mustang Mach-E had about 1.6 km, or nearly a mile, more wiring than a Tesla Model 3. When it took apart vehicles from its Chinese competitors, the findings were similarly surprising.
“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,” Farley said on an upcoming episode of the Office Hours: Business Edition podcast, first reported on by Business Insider.
Farley said the revelatory findings convinced the company to make a change. The legacy carmaker, known for ushering in the age of the automobile with its Model T, first launched in 1908, has struggled to compete in recent years, especially with the pace of innovation in electric vehicles being led by Chinese automakers.
In 2022, the CEO created a new division called Model E, in part to help Ford innovate on electric vehicles. The division lost more than $5 billion in 2024, but Farley noted on the podcast he knew diving into EV innovation was going to be “brutal business-wise.”
“My ethos is, take on the hardest problems as fast as you can and do it sometimes in public because you’ll solve them quicker that way,” Farley said, emphasizing the need for shareholders to have insight into Ford’s EV operations.
Still, EV sales in the U.S. have jumped in 2025, partly as consumers looked to buy before the federal EV tax credit expired at the end of September. While EV sales hit an all-time-high in the third quarter, according to Cox Automotive, Farley said on Ford’s third-quarter earnings call last month that EVs will only make up 5% of the U.S. car market in the near term.
Farley is also sounding the alarm about Chinese competitors. Last week, Farley told CBS Sunday Morning Chinese car companies pose an “existential threat” and have the capacity to take over the North American market and put homegrown automakers out of business.
Still, Ford has doubled down on its EV investments. In August, the company said it would pour $5 billion into EV production by changing up its manufacturing process and also revamping its Kentucky plant that produces its F-Series Super Duty trucks. The plan is reportedly to create a $30,000 electric pickup truck for the average person anticipated to be released in 2027.
“We can’t walk away from EVs, not just for the US, but if we want to be a global company, I’m not going to just cede that to the Chinese,” Farley said on the podcast.
