Keith Norton
speaker
64 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2025
last heard 12 May
Keith Norton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Yeah, CATL is in Marshall, Michigan right now, training workers, helping get this plant off the ground.
It's due to open uh this year.
It is uh Ford takes great pains to say it is fully owned by Ford and the workers are employed by Ford.
It is just a licensing deal, but they've had a good relationship to develop uh these lower cost L F P batteries that are central to uh Ford's efforts to overhaul
its EV strategy and and deploy more affordable EVs in twenty twenty seven.
Yeah, so um there continues to be these concerns as Mike is saying about ties to the Chinese Communist Party with C ATL.
But here's the reality you cannot pursue an EV strategy without dealing with the Chinese.
The Chinese control eighty percent of the world's capacity for batteries, and that is the most costly component of an electric vehicle.
C ATL has half of that.
So they're the battery giant that you must deal with if you wanna have an electric vehicle strategy.
Exactly right, 'cause the United States is still well behind the Chinese in EV technology, maybe a decade behind.
And of course the Chinese uh auto industry is supported by its government, so they have lower costs.
So Jim Farley, the CEO of Ford, says keep the Chinese out, but we also value our partnerships with the Chinese and we want to do more of them.
So yeah, it's a very fine
line that they're treading here and they do need Chinese tech if they want to have EVs, but they also would be swamped by Chinese competition if Chinese EVs were allowed into America.
Well, as you said, Ed, they did it far from Detroit.
This was set up in California.
It was led by Alan Clark, who's a former Tesla engineer.
And they sweat the details.
It's like improvement by a thousand cuts.
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