U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy would very much like Ford to stop doing business with China. Ford would very much like Duffy to read the fine print.
In a letter to CEO Jim Farley shared Tuesday, Duffy voiced "profound concern" over the automaker's dealings with Chinese firms and pressed Farley to sever the ties. Duffy painted Ford as "a foundational American brand actively intertwining its future with Chinese state-backed enterprises," a line that lands somewhere between a warning and a press release.
Duffy ran through the list. There's Ford's partnership with Geely, which lets the Chinese automaker build cars at a Ford plant in Spain. There's Ford's plan to keep manufacturing some Lincolns in China through 2030. And there's the one that clearly bothers Washington most: the technology-licensing deal with CATL that underpins Ford's new lithium iron phosphate battery plant in Marshall, Michigan.
"DOT remains deeply alarmed by Ford's continued reliance on licensed technology from Chinese battery manufacturer CATL at the operational BlueOval Battery Park facility," Duffy wrote. CATL, for the record, leads the world in LFP cells—the cheaper, durable chemistry that's exploded in popularity, and the exact reason Ford wanted the license in the first place.
Ford's response was blunt. In a statement shared with InsideEVs, the company noted the plant is owned, controlled, and staffed by Ford, calling the CATL arrangement "a limited technology-licensing and services agreement, not a joint venture or foreign-owned manufacturing operation." Then came the jab: the letter was "a wrongheaded attempt to capture headlines," and Ford pointed out that the White House itself praised the plant in a press release days earlier.
The Marshall facility is now ramping up production of LFP batteries for the Fathom, Ford's upcoming $30,000 EV pickup.
The politics here are bipartisan and hardening. A bill barring companies more than 15% Chinese-owned from selling cars in the U.S. cleared the Senate Commerce Committee unanimously in July, stacking on top of a 100% tariff and existing tech bans that already shoved Polestar out. The irony is hard to miss: as China cements its EV lead, Washington keeps pulling back federal support for the very industry it claims to be protecting.
[Images: Ford, U.S. Department of Transportation]
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