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The risk to almost a million US jobs is too great to allow imports of Chinese vehicles, according to Ford CEO Jim Farley. In an interview, Farley spoke with Fox News about rising car prices and global competition, telling Brian Kilmeade that China’s spare production capacity is so large that it could easily absorb the roughly 16 million new vehicles sold in the US, with room to spare.

“First of all, the Chinese have huge direct support for their auto companies,” Farley said, while noting that China has the ability to build an additional 21 million vehicles a year on top of the 29 million that are expected to roll off Chinese production lines in 2026. “They have enough capacity in China to cover all the manufacturing, all the vehicle sales in the United States,” Farley said.

“Manufacturing is the heart and soul of our country, and for us to lose those exports would be devastating for our country,” he continued, before pointing out the cybersecurity worries about Chinese cars. “All the vehicles have 10 cameras. They can collect a lot of data,” he said.

Farley has praised Chinese EVs like the Xiaomi SU7, even going on podcasts to sing its praises. But he believes Ford’s forthcoming affordable Kentucky-built EVs, due to start hitting dealerships next year, have what it takes to be competitive. When asked about new car prices rising an average of 2 percent last year, Farley repeatedly said that Ford had “worked with the administration” so that there’s “essentially no big impact” of the Trump tariffs. The CEO justified the rising costs by pointing to the F-150’s sales as proof of its value.

Is America an island?

More and more, we hear people idly wonder whether the US car market will become an isolated niche filled with products that are uncompetitive elsewhere. The Trump rollback of environmental protections, fuel economy standards, and clean vehicle incentives crashed EV sales toward the end of last year, with automakers like Ford canceling slow-selling products—and taking big write-downs in the process—to focus on more big body-on-frame pickups and SUVs with thirsty V6 and V8 engines and not the smaller, more efficient vehicles popular elsewhere.

But as we can see from Farley’s reply to Kilmeade, it’s long been the case that those vehicles, designed for the US, just won’t sell in Europe, China, or Japan in any meaningful numbers. Those markets want different things from US car buyers—or the things car companies and their marketing have told US car buyers to want—and are large enough that it’s worth the effort of designing and building cars to meet those needs (and regulations).

Even where pressure from the US government has caused a foreign government to allow US-approved vehicles onto its roads, as Japan recently did, Farley pointed out that there are “non-tariff barriers” that still make F-150s a very hard sell. There are regions with customers that are more welcoming to US imports—the Middle East, South America, Australia, and Southeast Asia—but even here, Ford sells its smaller, cheaper (Australian-designed) Ranger pickup.