Jim Farley didn’t send an intern. He went himself. The Ford CEO recently spent three days in Australia driving two Chinese plug-in hybrid pickups, the BYD Shark 6 and the Great Wall Cannon Alpha, alongside a Toyota Land Cruiser LC70. What came out of that exercise was a rare moment of corporate candor, laced with some kind of nervous humor.
Farley didn’t dismiss the Chinese trucks. He couldn’t. “They’re completely different types of vehicles”, he said. Is as close to a compliment as it gets when you’re talking about the competition.
His take on the BYD Shark 6 was measured but pointed. It looks like a workhorse pickup, drives like one too, but load 500 kilograms of cargo into the bed and it’s no longer in the same conversation as a Ranger or a Hilux. “If you’re not using it hard every day, but you still want an electric vehicle, it’s a very competitive product”.
The Great Wall Cannon Alpha earned a similar read. Strong contender in the mid-size segment, real presence in the market. But without the decades of chassis engineering, towing know-how, and heavy-load application experience that Ford and Toyota have spent generations building. That institutional knowledge doesn’t show up on a spec sheet. It shows up when you’re hauling a fifth-wheel trailer up a mountain at altitude.
Then came the punchline. Farley mentioned, almost in passing, that Ford’s engineers had already torn down the BYD Shark to study it. Their conclusion? They still can’t figure out how BYD makes money on it. That’s not a technical problem. That’s an economic one.
Chinese brands are moving fast into the global mid-size pickup segment, one of the most consistently profitable corners of the automotive industry. Farley knows it. His engineers know it. And somewhere in a teardown lab in Dearborn, someone is staring at a BYD Shark and doing the math again, hoping the numbers eventually make sense.
