Ford CEO Jim Farley ‘absolutely flabbergasted’ after ripping apart Tesla: ‘We hadn’t designed the … cars right’

Ford CEO Jim Farley recently sat down with the iconic automotive magazine Car and Driver for a wide-ranging interview about the future of Ford and electric vehicles.

Farley took the helm for the “Big Three” American automaker in 2020 and is known to automotive enthusiasts as a fellow gearhead with familial connections to the Ford brand.

In November, Farley was remarkably candid as he recalled Ford’s acquisition and disassembly — known as a “product teardown analysis” or “teardown” — of a Chinese EV.

Farley, who described feeling “humbled” during the EV teardown, shared a self-penned article about automotive electrification to the social platform X in June 2024, titled: “Confessions from a Petrol Head. I love electric vehicles and it has nothing to do with politics.”

Farley fondly called the revving of gas-powered engines the “soundtrack” of his life, adding: “So as a lifelong petrol head, I was surprised as anyone when I fell in love with electric vehicles.”

Directly thereafter, he said that neither “government policies” nor “political beliefs” had prompted his “late-career romance” with EVs, citing a reason to which any EV owner could relate.

“It’s because I drive one — my Ford F-150 Lightning Platinum. It is astonishingly quiet and smooth,” Farley said, lauding his truck’s “effortless acceleration.”

Clearly, Farley is motivated by a sincere love of the game and pragmatism, as evidenced by his expansive interview with Car and Driver. The outlet asked Farley about the launch of the F-150 Lightning and what Ford could have done differently.

“I totally would’ve done it differently. I mean, look, we didn’t know what we didn’t know,” the CEO said. Eventually, Ford leadership reached a conclusion.

“I guess it didn’t take us long to learn that our internal-combustion-engine prejudice was so high that we hadn’t designed the [electric] cars right,” Farley said, leading Car and Driver to ask him when the iconic automaker discovered it had “done EVs wrong.”

Farley pegged a Tesla teardown as the moment he and others at Ford fully grasped the issue: a baked-in engineering bias toward combustion engines as a default.

“I was just absolutely flabbergasted. … We didn’t know what was going on in [Tesla engineers’ ] minds. But now we understand. They had no prejudice. We had prejudice,” Farley said.

Ultimately, Farley believed electrification would’ve thrilled Ford’s founder and namesake for the first time in a century.

“I always say, I think Henry Ford would’ve been insanely bored over the last 100 years at Ford,” he began.

“But if he came back to the company now, he’d be up all night. … He’d be working on the next EREV [extended range EV] before our team was. Because I think as a founder, he was a tinkerer. He liked that transformational moment. We’re in that right now.”

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