Licensing battery technology from China is the key to staying competitive with its car manufacturers and finally beat them, according to Jim Farley
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by Chris Chilton
1 hour ago
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- China has years ahead of Western car manufacturers in battery technology, according to the CEO of Ford.
- Jim Farley told the New York Times that Ford had to access China’s battery IP if he wanted to compete.
- CATL batteries use LFP chemistry, originally developed in the United States and later acquired by China.
Ford desperately wants to trigger the threat posed by the Chinese automotive industry, but it needs China’s technical expertise to get there, according to the boss of Blue Oval.
The CEO, Jim Farley, told New York Times that China was in advance when it comes to making batteries for electric vehicles and that Ford’s only chance to get on an equal footing With the country’s automotive industry, then getting ahead, is to take advantage of their technology.
Related: Ford CEO slams Trump’s unjust prices that benefit foreign brands
“The way we compete is to access their IP as they needed us 20 years ago, then to use our innovative ecosystem and our American ingenuity and our large scale and our intimacy with the customer to beat them The global scale, ”Farley told Thomas L. Friedman du Nyt. “It will be one of the most important races to save our industrial economy.”
Farley does not speak of a future distant plan, but something that already happens. The enormous Blueoval Blueoval battery of the automaker is currently half-construction, and when it is operational in 2026, it will cause thousands of batteries of lithium ion phosphate (LFP) which are based on China Catl technology .
Pay China for American technology
It is a lot that we knew, but there is something we did not know about Catl’s intelligent chemistry, and perhaps you did not do it either: it was initially developed in the United States And then picked up for the sous by the Chinese. By referring to a story of anterior Bloomberg, the NYT explains how the LFP was discovered by scientists from the University of Texas, then marketed by A123 Systems LLC, a startup which received a ton of money by the administration Obama.
But the EV market was slow to develop and A123 went bankrupt, the remains of the latter, including the IP battery, finally bought by what was at the time the largest company of automotive parts in China.
You might say that decline is a wonderful thing and that no one could really know a decade ago that electric vehicles would become such a large part of the automotive industry. But the Chinese thought it was. Tesla also did it before any other Western brand. Each large car manufacturer worked on electric vehicles because they knew they should possibly sell them in large numbers to achieve emission targets.
Looking back from a 2025 point of view, it seems incredible that the technology was allowed not only to leave our hands, but to fall into the hands of one of its greatest opponents. Whoever, according to the Bloomberg report, controls 83% of all the manufacture of lithium-ion batteries.
Ford works on a baby EV of less than $ 30,000 to fight against affordable electric cars of China who have not yet landed in the United States, but already make their presence feel in other regions where Ford also sells cars . While prices on cars imported from China in the United States protect Ford from the threat of Byd in America (for the moment), they also make Lincoln Nautilus by Lincoln Nautilus, more expensive once sent to American dealers.
