Ford Motor Company CEO Jim Farley has said the company learned a crucial lesson about electric vehicle design after conducting a teardown of a Tesla vehicle, admitting that Ford’s long history with internal combustion engines had influenced its early approach to EV engineering.
Farley made the remarks in a recent interview with Car and Driver magazine, where he discussed Ford’s evolving strategy in the rapidly expanding electric vehicle market.
The CEO said the experience of dismantling and studying Tesla’s design left him “absolutely flabbergasted” and revealed how deeply Ford’s thinking had been shaped by its combustion-engine heritage.
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"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 told the publication. Farley has led the American automaker since 2020 and has increasingly positioned Ford as a key competitor in the EV market.
Tesla teardown revealed a shift in engineering thinking
According to Farley, Ford’s leadership team gained important insights after analysing Tesla’s engineering approach during a vehicle teardown which is a process in which a competitor’s product is disassembled and studied in detail.
The exercise helped Ford engineers recognise how Tesla approached EV design without the legacy assumptions associated with traditional gasoline-powered vehicles. "I was just absolutely flabbergasted," Farley said in the interview, recalling the moment the company realised how differently Tesla engineers had approached the design process.
"We didn’t know what was going on in their minds. But now we understand. They had no prejudice. We had prejudice," he said.
Farley also spoke of the development of Ford’s new electric pickup truck, the F-150 Lightning, stating that the company learned many valuable lessons in the process.
"I totally would’ve done it differently. We didn’t know what we didn’t know," he said.
From petrol enthusiast to EV advocate
Farley, despite his love of petrol-driven cars, has come to appreciate the value of electric mobility.
In a post on LinkedIn in 2024, Farley described himself as a "petrol head," having grown up loving the sound of petrol engines. However, after driving Ford's new electric pickup truck, his views have changed.
"It is astonishingly quiet and smooth," he said of the Ford F-150 Lightning Platinum, noting the fast acceleration of the vehicle. Farley also believes that the company's founder, Henry Ford, would have been thrilled by the move towards electrification.
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“I always say Henry Ford would’ve been insanely bored over the last 100 years,” Farley said. "But if he came back to the company now, he’d be up all night working on the next extended-range EV."
Ford Motor’s CEO described the global move toward electric vehicles as a significant change for the automotive industry. “We’re in that transformational moment right now,” he said.
