Ford Teams Up With Chinese Rival Geely to Build EVs in Spain
The joint venture turns a Ford plant that currently makes gas-powered SUVs into a shared EV production line, just as Washington moves to lock Chinese automakers out of the U.S. market.
Ford is going into business with one of the Chinese automakers reshaping the global car industry. The company announced Thursday that it's forming a joint venture with Geely to build electric vehicles at Ford's plant in Valencia, Spain, a notable move given how much energy Ford and its legacy rivals have spent trying to fend off Chinese competition rather than partner with it.
The mechanics are straightforward. Ford will hold 66% of the new venture, Geely the remaining 34%. Pending regulatory sign-off, the operation is set to start up in the first half of 2027, with actual vehicles coming off the line in 2028. Until then, the Valencia plant keeps doing what it's doing now: building the Ford Kuga, one of the automaker's SUVs sold in Europe.
That gap between announcement and production tells you something about how these deals work. Retooling a plant to build EVs, especially ones built around Geely's technology, isn't a light switch. It takes time to sort out approvals, restructure the manufacturing line, and align two companies' engineering standards. The 2027-to-2028 timeline reflects that reality rather than any reluctance to move fast.
An old relationship, a new arrangement
Ford and Geely aren't strangers. The relationship goes back to 2010, when Ford sold Volvo Cars to the Chinese automaker, a deal that turned Geely into a serious player on the global stage and gave it a foothold in European engineering and design. That history likely made this latest arrangement easier to negotiate than a deal between total strangers would have been.
It also fits a pattern Ford CEO Jim Farley has been signaling for a while. Farley has spoken favorably about how quickly Chinese automakers move and the quality of what they're building, and he's said Ford would look to partnerships as part of its global strategy. This joint venture is that strategy showing up in concrete form: rather than trying to out-build Geely and its peers from scratch, Ford is sharing a factory floor with one.
The broader backdrop is the speed at which Chinese EV makers have expanded beyond their home market over the past several years. Companies that once competed mainly on price inside China have been pushing into Europe, Southeast Asia, and Latin America with vehicles that Western automakers increasingly view as legitimate threats on both cost and technology. Ford, General Motors, Volkswagen, and others have spent recent years trying to figure out how to respond, whether through pricing, new EV platforms, or, in this case, direct collaboration.
The politics cut the other way
The timing makes the deal more striking. Ford and Geely's announcement landed just a day after a U.S. Senate committee approved legislation aimed at tightening the existing ban on Chinese automakers entering the American market. Washington's posture toward Chinese-made vehicles, and Chinese auto technology more broadly, has been hardening, driven by concerns about competition, supply chains, and national security.
That contrast is worth sitting with: American lawmakers are working to keep Chinese automakers further away from U.S. roads, while an American automaker is simultaneously building a manufacturing partnership with one of those same companies, just not on U.S. soil. The Valencia plant sits in Europe, where the regulatory and political environment around Chinese EV makers, while tense in its own right, hasn't produced the kind of blanket restrictions under discussion in Washington.
For Ford, the venture offers a way to plug into Geely's EV engineering and cost structure without having to build that capability from the ground up domestically, and to do it in a market, Europe, where Chinese brands are already gaining ground regardless of what Ford does. For Geely, it's a way to get vehicles built inside Europe, using an established plant and a familiar partner, at a moment when trade friction around Chinese-made EVs entering Western markets is only growing.
What happens with the Valencia plant over the next two years will be worth watching, both for what it says about how Western automakers plan to compete with Chinese EV makers and for how governments on both sides of the Atlantic respond to a partnership that blurs a line policymakers have been trying to draw more firmly.
