Ford CEO loves his Chinese Xiaomi electric car – urgent need for partnerships with companies like Lenovo

It sounds like a man bites dog story: Ford’s CEO drove the Xiaomi SU7, which is admittedly one of the best electric vehicles you can’t buy in the US, and he doesn’t want to give it up. Xiaomi is currently selling between 10k and 20k SU7s per month and these cars are on backorder for about 6 months, showing how popular they are while Ford is struggling. And Ford The CEO isn’t the only one who’s very concerned.

I’m a former competitive analyst, and during my initial training we used the Ford and GM competitive analysis teams as they existed in the mid-60s as examples of how not to do the job. Chinese automakers are quickly eclipsing every other automaker on the planet, and everyone from Japanese to American is worried that if tariffs and sanctions are lifted (as they eventually will be), the existing major automakers will go bankrupt. .

It’s similar to what happened when the Japanese automakers created their quality- and geography-focused design teams in the 1970s, when they nearly wiped out the American auto markers of the time, and it looks a lot worse than it did before.

The problem of competitive analysis in the 1970s

During my training, I was given the example of GM and Ford, which saw the growth of Japanese auto companies as a threat and had some of the most well-funded competitive analysis teams on the planet.

So they took a 1966 Japanese car from companies like Toyota and Nissan and took it apart, analyzing every bolt, every nut and every part in these cars. Over five years, they developed a plan to create cars better than those in Japan. The only problem was that Japan never stopped moving forward, and by the time Ford came out with the Pinto and GM came out with the Vega to compete with Japan, Japanese cars had improved greatly and these American cars weren’t competitive at all.

They were a big improvement over the cars of the mid-60s. It’s just that Japan, which many saw as a country that copied the work of other firms, has outpaced the firms they once copied, and American automakers have found themselves at a disadvantage. This problem was greatly exacerbated by the huge gas shortage and rising gas prices in the 1970s, which nearly drove out GM and Ford.

The problem was that conducting the incredibly detailed analysis took so long that it added to the typical 3-5 year product cycle for US firms, rendering the result less than useless.

The need for technical partnerships to increase production cycle times

Chinese car companies are moving even faster than Japanese ones ever did, and even Japan is concerned that they are being left in the dust. This means that to survive, US auto companies will have to move away from 3-5 year product cycles and start implementing product cycles much more similar to personal electronics manufacturing cycles to keep up. Some, like Lotus, are partnering with companies like Lenovo to stay competitive as tech companies are used to such fast cycles (it was announced at Lenovo Tech World this year).

Electric vehicles in particular are moving computers that have become unsustainably complex over time, leading to reliability issues and long delays between application advances. It is imperative that these car companies get on the same page with technology companies and increase the speed of innovation; otherwise, Chinese companies will leave them behind, just as Japanese companies did decades ago.

Summing up:

It’s not just Ford and GM who are concerned about how quickly Chinese auto companies are growing and how good and affordable their cars are. These companies need to follow Lotus’ example and partner with technology companies like NVIDIA and Lenovo, which are not only closer to the technologies that are driving Chinese automakers, but also to the speed at which these advances are happening; otherwise they will be left in the dust and once the sanctions and tariffs are lifted, so will their companies because they are not competitive right now.

Rob Enderle is a technology analyst at Torque News covering automotive technology and battery development. You can find out more about Rob at Wikipedia and follow his articles on Forbes, XAnd LinkedIn.