For the past year, automakers have expressed fear over Chinese manufacturers’ incredible speed and low costs. Ford CEO Jim Farley told Fox News it would be “devastating” if Chinese EVs were allowed into the United States. Honda boss Toshihiro Mibe has said competing against them is impossible. Toyota’s Koji Sato told nearly 500 suppliers in March that the company was in a crisis it might not survive.
Now Geely Automobile Holdings is looking to make peace. The Chinese automaker is offering legacy brands a starter kit for building cars at the same speed as its rivals back home.
The package includes access to 800 engineers, modular platforms, AI-driven electrical architectures and Geely’s manufacturing systems, all aimed at cutting development cycles and cost, according to Automotive News. The industry has started calling it a reverse joint venture, and the name is doing a lot of work.
Zhang Yu, managing director of Automotive Foresight in Shanghai, put it to Automotive News about as plainly as you can. For decades the foreign partner brought the product and the platform while the Chinese partner paid to license it. “Now, it’s reversed. They borrow from the Chinese side.”
Geely’s proposal to American automakers
Geely’s External Collaboration Research Institute was established in 2021. It now has more than 100 projects running with around a dozen clients, including Renault and Waymo.
What ECRI sells is an R&D ecosystem: turnkey vehicle development, engineering work and technical consulting. It also hands partners Geely’s China Speed product development system, which covers planning, design, finance, supply, manufacturing and sales, plus Geely’s modular manufacturing methods.
ECRI president Aileen Wang told Automotive News that operating in the world’s most competitive car market has sharpened Geely’s speed, efficiency and cost discipline, and that the advantage isn’t just headcount but the quality of the engineering behind it.
She expects the institute to grow from 800 engineers to 2,000 by 2030, roughly doubling the number of projects it can handle.
Automakers from Europe, the United States and Japan have struggled to keep pace with Geely and its Chinese rivals, generally because of thinner engineering benches and less efficient manufacturing. ECRI’s whole pitch is that you can rent your way out of that gap instead of building it yourself.
Geely needs this more than Ford does
Here’s the part that reframes the whole thing. Geely isn’t extending a hand out of generosity. Its home market is falling apart.
The company reported first-half results on August 17, three days before the ECRI story broke. Exports surged 158 percent year over year to 474,228 vehicles. Domestic sales in China fell 22.6 percent.
Overseas markets are now the company’s only growth engine, and Geely knows it. It raised its 2026 export target from 640,000 vehicles to 920,000 and started talking publicly about a one-million-unit overseas ambition.
So when Geely offers to teach Ford how to build cars the Chinese way, that offer is coming from a company whose Chinese customers are walking away at a rate of nearly a quarter a year. Selling engineering services to Western automakers isn’t charity. It’s diversification.
Its own results presentation names the strategy outright, listing Volvo Cars, Proton, Renault Group and Ford as the partners carrying its globalization plan.
What Ford is actually getting in Valencia
Ford is already a customer. In July the two companies announced a joint venture at Ford’s Almussafes plant near Valencia, Spain, and it’s another entry in a long list of Ford working with Chinese partners while asking Washington to keep Chinese cars out.
Farley hasn’t exactly hidden it, either. On Ford’s first-quarter earnings call in April he said the company leverages global partnerships and IP sharing, Chinese companies included, to grow its business worldwide. That’s the same executive who told Fox News that manufacturing is the heart and soul of the country.
The plant itself explains the deal. Almussafes has been running since 1976 and has capacity for roughly 500,000 vehicles a year, but it builds only the Kuga after losing the S-Max and Galaxy in 2023, and Bloomberg reported it is currently running at under a quarter of capacity.
Ford will hold 66 percent of the venture, Geely 34, with Geely paying €221 million for its share. Operations start in the first half of 2027 pending approvals, with the first new vehicles built in 2028.
Four new models are coming: a compact, rugged member of the Bronco family, a multi-energy family crossover designed by Ford and developed jointly with Geely, and two Geely-branded electric SUVs, one of them expected to be the EX5. Kuga production continues throughout.
And there’s the piece nobody in the press release wanted to say out loud. Europe spent two years building a tariff wall against Chinese-built EVs. This deal gives Geely its first European production base, which means those two electric SUVs get built inside the wall rather than shipped through it.
Pooling volume across two brands in one factory lowers the cost of every car that leaves it, which is how both companies plan to survive against BYD and MG on price. It’s the same move Chery is exploring at Nissan’s Sunderland plant and Dongfeng at Stellantis’ factory in Rennes.
So the trade is fairly clear. Ford gets cheap European product development and a full factory. Geely gets tariff-free European manufacturing and a Western partner willing to say out loud that the Chinese approach works better.
Only one of those companies has been telling Congress the other one is an existential threat.
