BEIJING — America’s best-selling vehicle for more than 35 years, Ford’s thundering F-150, is officially hitting the streets of China. And drivers in the world’s largest car market aren’t quite sure what to think.
He Zongyuan, the manager of Chinese car club Being Rich AAA Auto Beauty Center, sees that the bulging pickups are “masculine,” even “macho.” But trucks here are regarded as country cars for country people — a lifestyle hundreds of millions want to leave behind.
The Detroit automaker is nevertheless betting that the allure of gas-guzzling Americana will outweigh China’s many roadblocks — choked highways, soaring taxes and social stigmas, not to mention pickup bans on city streets.
And Ford is doing it in an intriguing way: Shipping the made-in-America trucks around the world from a country where imports and exports have quickly become a political battleground.
Ford’s Chinese expansion highlights an awkward reality for President Trump’s “America First” agenda. As his administration pushes to retrench behind the walls of protectionist policy, it will likely clash with corporate America’s lucrative embrace of global trade.
“After 100-plus years of the auto industry, the U. S. is just not the big dog anymore. It certainly doesn’t have the growth potential that China does,” said Karl Brauer, the executive publisher of Kelley Blue Book.
For the auto industry, Brauer added, the sentiment is “we have to be a global participant in the economy and in commerce, or we’ll suffer.”
Many U. S. automakers have refocused from traditional domestic sales to the potential gold mine of China — the world’s most populous country, with fast-growing wealth and a burgeoning middle class.
The country is a ripe market for Ford, which last month saw its U. S. sales of new cars slump even as sales of F-series trucks climbed. Volkswagen, battered in the United States by its emissions-cheating scandal, has nevertheless become the world’s largest automaker, partly due to its roaring Chinese success.
Ford now offers a smattering of compact and luxury cars to Chinese buyers, built in Chinese factories. But it has no such Chinese production lines capable of building its big pickups, meaning the first Ford trucks to officially land in the communist superpower will all be American-made.
Ford’s first made-for-China batch, announced last spring, was built in the automaker’s plant in Dearborn, Mich., and shipped from Portland, Ore.
