I shared office with an enterprise salesman for a year. We talked over lunch. Among the things he said: If you want to sell to someone in the long run, then be honest with them. Don't give their competitors better prices and lie about it. It's okay to tell someone that their competitors get better pricing because of volume or for other understandable reasons, but lying is not okay, because people will find out eventually and then your long-term relationship goes sour.
CATL clearly wants to be a really big battery vendor and sell to lots of battery purchasers. I consider it very likely that they treat Ford well.
... China requires auto makers to use batteries from one of its approved suppliers if they want to be cleared to mass-produce electric cars and plug-in hybrids and to qualify for subsidies. These suppliers are all Chinese, so such global leaders as South Korea’s LG Chem Ltd and Japan’s Panasonic Corp. are excluded.
... Foreign batteries aren’t officially banned in China, but auto executives say that since 2016 they have been warned by government officials that they must use Chinese batteries in their China-built cars, or face repercussions. That has forced them to spend millions of dollars to redesign cars to work with inferior Chinese batteries, they say.
... “We want to comply, and we have to comply,” said one executive with a foreign car maker. “There’s no other option.”
I don't know any specifics of Ford and CATL, but it was always the Chinese gov't driving their growth either by protectionism or undercutting foreign competitors with subsidies which is why Chinese EVs are being pushed back by the trade regulators in EU/US/Turkiye/France/etc..
I have no reason to believe that it was motivated China's altruism to pass the best price to their American customers.
China's cost competitiveness comes from China's protectionism and subsidies past decade. The EU Commission has already conducted an antisubsidy investigation against Chinese EV imports and imposed countervailing measures earlier this year (see EU's Implementation of Regulation 2024/1866) based on prohibited export subsidies given to Chinese EV makers (or MIC EVs).
The outcome of that investigation was predetermined.
The French government began pushing for tariffs. The Germans opposed the idea, but France turned out to have more political support on this issue. The EU needs a technical justification for tariffs, so the Commission launched an investigation. That investigation came to the conclusion it needed to in order to justify the policy that had already been decided on at the political level.
The conclusions of the report are petty ridiculous. China has a much more competitive EV market than the EU does, and Chinese manufacturers are much lower cost as a consequence. When Chinese companies export EVs to Europe, they sell them at a very substantial markup, which is the exact opposite of dumping.
The types of subsidies the EU is complaining about are the exact same types of subsidies that EU countries themselves (and US states) give. They're things like government funding for charging infrastructure and sales-tax exemptions.