Chinese parts in Ford Mavericks... are there any? [ADMIN WARNING: NO POLITICS]

[Snox801]

With the "Modern Way" of manufacturing.. (assembly line/robotics).
You can build the same thing, just about anywhere...

Jerry

Yet china hasn’t figure out how to make anything good with that modern way. Name one product they produce that’s better than the counter part from Japan, America, or any other industrial nation.
I can think of a single one.

Sponsored

 

[Automan21]

It’s assembled in Mexico, nuff said.

 

[Mr Pmzrq]

There was a recall just announced regarding a Chinese battery. Broncos and Mavericks built between February 2021 and October 2023.

 

[Meeka]

We had a stretch of -30C weather, warming up today thankfully. This underhood 3A Battery Tender has been a life saver. My truck frequently goes into battery saver mode, disabling the Wi-Fi remote start.

Looking at your photo, you have the charger/maintainer there permanently for now? I attach mine to positive post and then negative to a ground elsewhere on frame. Not as cold in Balmy B.C. Tho!

 

[HeyBales]

Yet china hasn’t figure out how to make anything good with that modern way. Name one product they produce that’s better than the counter part from Japan, America, or any other industrial nation.
I can think of a single one.

They used to years ago when 1st entering into the market for US companies as the manufacturing plant. If the same spec's already in place were used there.

This was when the US business had to station a team there to confirm quality control and spec's were actually met.
Then the foreign business realized they could cut costs by getting rid of the team. I'm sure video and pics is just as good as hands/eyes on!

Now I think far too businesses trust the plant will meet the contracts in place, with totally their own control over it. While this same plant to keep busy does much cheaper stuff on the side.
Or to save even more money/prevent increasing prices - they take the suggestions these plants give to cut costs.
I've read several articles where the US business decides the costs need to come down/not increase - and instead of figuring it out themselves and telling the plant, just make the plant team figure it out to meet a price point and some spec level.
Introduce cheaper plastics, thinner metal, thinner wires/shielding, short cuts to assembly, ect.

Never mind the products and plants that are going for cheapest possible from the get go, because that's what the majority of consumers want. Almost throw-away, right?

 

[GreatWhiteNorth]

Looking at your photo, you have the charger/maintainer there permanently for now? I attach mine to positive post and then negative to a ground elsewhere on frame. Not as cold in Balmy B.C. Tho!

Yes, I've had it laying in there couple of years now, no issues. I just finished installing a 2A underhood charger in the wife's Corolla. Same thing, poor little battery struggling in the cold weather. City driving, cold weather, frequent stops, doesn't help.

 

[skinnyboy]

Me too! Zero regrets. Chinese parts aside. For us Canucks, I wonder how potential (pending?) trade tarrifs are going to affect Maverick pricing, and availability? Are made-in-Mexico Mavericks, with their blend of global parts, going to be subject to a 25% tariff being "imported" into the USA? An odd situation may arise, where Mavericks destined for Canada, just being shipped straight thru the US to Canada (and not subject to tariffs), will be cheaper in Canada. I'm a little worried about supply chain issues with what's going on.

Might be the least of our worries.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/bus...ffs-before-almost-100-years-ago-and-it-was-a/

Cheers.

 

[jonshep]

Almost everything you own was made in China or has parts or assemblies made in China. My 22 year old F250 needed a new alternator. I took it to the local NAPA store and traded it in on a brand new remaned alternator from Mexico. The Mex plant may well be owned by China, managed by Chinese but laborers are Mexican nationals. We live in global markets so don't worry where the parts are outsourced to. Most are excellent.

 

[JohnCondren1933]

Hi, Canadian here... was watching CNN and saw Ontario Premier Doug Ford being interviewed. Speaking about the auto industry, he said some automakers (he didn't say who) were building Chinese made parts, into their assembled-in-Mexico vehicles. As a Maverick owner, that made me wonder.

Anyone know, ARE THERE made-in-China parts in the Maverick?

I belive at this point there is very little in the platform built on Chinese mainland, for reasons
- I don't believe there are any parts for a platform with this volume, that are not also made by a North American supplier, or could not be readily quoted & fixturing/tooling built quickly to supply.

Ford gets majority of its lithium-ion batteries from South Korea SK & LG, a Ford-SK joint venture, & China's CATL but to my understanding the China CATL are only in Mach-E & Lightning (& NOT the sole supplier!)

"Reasons" are because fuel transportation costs have made transporting parts from China uneconomical vs manufacturing in North America, so Chinese Tier 1 mfgers have begun massively building supplier plants in Mexico to supply the US market (specifically EV batteries).

I work in the Tier 1 automotive supplier industry & feel this comment is perhaps missing some context? There is likely small components in Maverick from Chinese-owned supplier plants in Mexico, but at this point with shipping transport costs from China, there is simply no economically competitive way to import parts from China even if they were built for free from slave labor.

Now as far as ANYTHING in the Ford product line having a sole-supplier (with the probable exception of the low-volume Ford GTR), at this point for Ford specifically, absolutely not!

Let me explain why because this indirectly affected my production line at the time.

In 2015 Ford completed its staged partial shutdowns & full retooling from the ground up, of its F-150 plants from steel to aluminum body. Very little carried over, welding, adhesives, coatings, even robotics handling grippers & robotics motion-control tuning of aluminum vs steel stampings handling is different. Anyways to state the obvious, the F-series is Ford's bread butter steak & eggs, volume manufacturing lets Ford build & sell a shitload of F-series from the same high fixed costs of automation development AND charge a premium it was at the time 30% of Fords contribution margin aka profits (revenue - materials & labor).

The retooling had already hit volume production (ie THE platform bringing in the cash for everything else) & just when Ford had fully completed the retooling, massive new plants cost, & backlogged order-volume to fill...truck frame deliveries began dropping off a cliff, only to seem to resume full deliveries before zero truck frames delivered again!
To say this was THE perfect disaster storm for Ford is an understatement.

Ford's supply chain had multiple suppliers for almost everything, but had short-sightedly picked a sole supplier for 1 major cost part, steel frame, trying to cut parts costs to cover the increased cost of aluminum vs the steel bodied competitors. I'm pretty sure the why is public domain now (I hope), the supplier Metalsa had a stellar supplier record but was then acquired by a Mexican consortium who's goal was to take Tier 1 supplier market-share at any cost.
(side note this thinking is the suicide of Tier 1 suppliers, see Takata with airbags)

Metalsa possibly quoted an unrealistically lower price that competitor Tower would not match, & this fantasy projection possibly came from using a lowball-bid automation integrator without a track record in Tier 1, who was also trying to break into a new supplier industry (possibly ).

Typically what gets cut in these bids is all but basic Alarm & Status messages, these are features added at a premium later on after excessive downtime from service techs not knowing the problem makes automakers bring the integrator back on because they need optimization fast. But when your margins are razor thin you don't have the profits to pay for the Alarm & Status message conditioning ( or extra display screens at the problem areas to see the messages) & you start the race to the bottom ala Nissan legacy suppliers.

Ford possibly picked the sole supplier because on paper they saved money over also buying from a higher-cost 2nd supplier.

In any case, perfect storm for Ford: massive new automation fixed costs needing to be paid for, huge order backlog of high-margin vehicles that would pay for it as soon as they were built, but the ongoing delivery delays causing huge Ford volume work-truck buyers waiting on deliveries to drop the orders & buy GM & RAM which were available.

I'm not sure how long it took Ford to realize they needed a 2nd supplier immediately, but allegedly only competitor Towers significant previous work optimizing a production run enabled them to so quickly order the machinery & tool up production to meet the volume.

This is my conjecture not anyone from Ford, but I think Ford could have been put in some of the most serious financial trouble it ever faced had it not been for management decisions at Tower, that's where I come from that there's no way this lesson didn't make it all the way through Dearborn supplier management.

 

[JohnCondren1933]

The vast majority of computer components (CPUs/modules/sensors, capacitors, computer boards and many more) are made in Asia, namely; Taiwan, South Korea, Vietnam, and China, so the chances are very good that it's true. The same is also true of the vast majority of vehicles made in Canada and US too, so it's kind of a strange comment from Doug Ford.

Very wrong post-covid on "vast majority" of anything, when it comes to the automotive Tier 1 supply chain, VERY much including electronics!

Consumer electronics are predominantly assembled in China yes.
Automotive-grade electronics & semiconductors had largely been legacy generations as far as circuit density & function integration, & a large volume of those were manufactured on legacy semiconductor fabs in China, at a price-point that did not make sense for others to invest in fab equipment to supply them.
That changed after covid when US automakers ended up with 00s of 000s of vehicles waiting for deliveries of cheap legacy semiconductors they now couldn't get quickly at any price because their firmware developer codebase had not been ported to newer more expensive semiconductor architecture.
Production volume moved to North America very rapidly because the OEMs had no choice. Of course there is still alot of automotive electronics production in China, but there is virtually no equivalence between the consumer electronics & automotive electronics supplier industries except probably the LCD displays -- which I can assure you are a much smaller $ amount of the total $s of electronics & controllers in most vehicles than most think.

 

[GreatWhiteNorth]

Thnx for that super detailed and informative reply!

 

[icegradner]

Very wrong post-covid on "vast majority" of anything, when it comes to the automotive Tier 1 supply chain, VERY much including electronics!

If you are just talking about US vehicle bound components, sure there are some small North American semi-conductor companies. Of course half of them are owned by Asian companies, but let's not worry about that. I was not talking about just the US, like you were in your post, so I was not wrong at all.

 

[CG - All the way]

Yet china hasn’t figure out how to make anything good with that modern way. Name one product they produce that’s better than the counter part from Japan, America, or any other industrial nation.
I can think of a single one.

Electric automobiles. Even Musk and Tesla are losing this race, but then that is not saying much...............

 

[JohnCondren1933]

Electric automobiles. Even Musk and Tesla are losing this race, but then that is not saying much...............

Define "lose". China Communist Party is subsidizing new EVs to where 00s of 00s of brand new barely used EVs sold to shadow companies are sitting in fields, if you want video on the Chinese EV scam I'll look it up.

Suffice it to say lithium-ion batteries have been around awhile, cheap, light with high power to size density, but hadn't been used because so extremely dangerous if impacted the fire burns hotter than magnesium & the reaction generates its own oxygen, water & foam do not put it out.
A significant cost of lithium-ion is the armor housing & cooling systems, Chinese EVs skip that to make cheap light EVs because noone notices until you crash or use a faulty charging cable & the resulting fire cannot be put out conventionally, and the intense heat ignites nearby EVs which is why a bunch of Chinese parking garages outright ban EVs.

 

[CG - All the way]

Define "lose". China Communist Party is subsidizing new EVs to where 00s of 00s of brand new barely used EVs sold to shadow companies are sitting in fields, if you want video on the Chinese EV scam I'll look it up.

Suffice it to say lithium-ion batteries have been around awhile, cheap, light with high power to size density, but hadn't been used because so extremely dangerous if impacted the fire burns hotter than magnesium & the reaction generates its own oxygen, water & foam do not put it out.
A significant cost of lithium-ion is the armor housing & cooling systems, Chinese EVs skip that to make cheap light EVs because noone notices until you crash or use a faulty charging cable & the resulting fire cannot be put out conventionally, and the intense heat ignites nearby EVs which is why a bunch of Chinese parking garages outright ban EVs.

I do not get dragged into stupid debates. Suffice to say, look at percentage of increase/decrease of sales in Jan and Feb. The tesla made in China uses 6100 local producers in the "Chinese" tesla. EV battery technology and R&D has already surpassed that of the U.S.

As we say in the South: "Just hide and watch................." Peace!

Sponsored