Who The F#$k Is Foxconn

Foxconn is not a household name.

Unless you’re an avid and attentive reader of this newsletter (because I’ve mentioned them in 11 different Change Optimist posts since I started writing back in early 2024), it’s entirely possible that you’ve never heard of them.

That said, there is a very good chance that there’s a device in your home, in your backpack, or in your pocket that was manufactured by Foxconn.

Foxconn manufactures over half of the iPhones and iPads in the wild, as well as many other Apple products, including the MacBook Air, the MacBook Pro, and the budget-priced MacBook Neo.

They make the Amazon Kindle.

They make Google’s Pixel phones. They also made the now-defunct Google Pixelbook and the Pixelbook Go.

They’ve made certain models of both Google Home and Amazon Alexa (you might vaguely remember a 2019 scandal in which Foxconn hired children as “interns” to help keep up with Alexa device production).

They make Microsoft’s Xbox, Sony’s PlayStation, and Nintendo’s Switch.

Working closely with TSMC, they make approximately 50% of the world’s AI servers and enterprise data center hardware, including helping NVIDIA scale production of their new Vera Rubin AI supercomputer.

And for 20 years, they’ve had their sights on the automotive industry.

In 2005, Foxconn acquired Antai Electrical Industry, one of Taiwan’s four major automotive wire harness manufacturers, and entered into the automotive parts business.

Over the following decade, Foxconn became an EV parts supplier for several OEMs, including Tesla, BMW, and Mercedes-Benz.

In 2014, Foxconn founder Terry Gou launched a New Energy Vehicle project under the code name “A-Fu Initiative,” but it didn’t really get off the ground.

In 2020, Foxconn released the Mobility in Harmony Consortium (MIH) Electric Vehicle Open Platform, a modular EV chassis they described as “the Android system of the EV industry”. That same year, Foxconn and Yulon Group established a joint venture they called Foxtron Vehicle Technologies.

In 2021, Foxtron showed off three prototype vehicles: the Model C (an electric mid-size SUV), Model E (an electric sedan), and Model T (an electric bus). They’ve been shopping these vehicles around to other OEMs ever since.

In 2024, Foxconn announced it had selected BlackBerry and the BlackBerry IVY® platform to power its next-generation passenger and commercial vehicle platforms.

Foxconn bought and later sold a former GM (and former Lordstown Motors) factory in Lordstown, Ohio, after owning it for three years and failing to establish any meaningful vehicle production there.

Before Apple killed off its mysterious car project (Project Titan), there was a lot of speculation that Foxconn was the most likely manufacturing partner since the two companies were already inextricably connected. Foxconn was eager to start building cars. Lordstown could have become the US assembly hub for the Apple Car. But Apple killed the project in 2024.

When Nissan’s merger talks with Honda fell apart in 2025, as the Japanese car company considered other merger or joint-venture partners, Foxconn was seen as a likely candidate.

In October 2025, Stellantis announced a collaboration with NVIDIA, Uber, and, you guessed it, Foxconn to launch a robotaxi service.

Things have changed in the last 6 months. Foxtron has given up waiting for other companies to adopt their tech or leverage their production capacity for manufacturing and has released two new vehicles of their own.

First, there’s the Foxtron Bria, a battery electric compact crossover SUV built on that aforementioned MIH platform.

It was styled by Pininfarina.

Mitsubishi has agreed to let Foxtron develop a rebadged Bria, which it plans to sell in Australia and New Zealand in the latter half of 2026.

This week, Foxtron introduced the Cavira, an electric vehicle with a dual-motor variant producing 468 hp, accelerating from 0-100 km/h in 3.8 seconds, and offering up to 334 miles of range.

It’s a vehicle aimed squarely at competing with the Tesla Model Y.

The Cavira starts at 1,239,000 New Taiwan dollars, which is roughly $38,167 US, and it will be available in Taiwan first.

There’s no word on availability in the rest of the world.

Foxconn and Foxtron have wanted to play in the automotive sandbox for a long time.

And this year, they found their sand shovel and pail.

As vehicles become more like devices and less like mechanical gearboxes, Foxconn is incredibly well-positioned to stake a claim to a share of global automotive sales.

At the end of May, the US and Taiwan finalized a trade and investment agreement that caps Section 232 tariff rates on specified imports, including vehicles from Taiwan at 15%, according to the US Commerce Department.

That means, as it stands today, vehicles imported into the US from Taiwan face a 10% lower tariff rate than those imported from Mexico and Canada.

With their partnerships with other auto manufacturers around the world, including Xpeng, Stellantis, and Mitsubishi, we might go from having Foxconn-made products in our pockets to having Foxconn-made products in our driveways very soon.

The Hyundai Ioniq V was spotted in China. carnewschina.com

BYD starts hiring for management roles in Toronto. autonews.com

The new Denza Z9 GT can drive over 1,000 km (621 miles) without stopping, fully recharge in under 10 minutes, and starts at about $40,000 in China. electrek.co

Tata Motors will use a vehicle platform from Chery to locally build electric cars under its premium Avinya brand. reuters.com

Chinese EVs may hit the US within a few years, one way or another. cnbc.com

Tesla pushes Roadster demo to August as SpaceX thruster work continues. electrek.co

Google to pay SpaceX $920 million a month for compute capacity at xAI data centers. cnbc.com

J.P. Morgan upgraded Tesla to “neutral” from “underweight,” citing that the electric-vehicle maker’s valuation is increasingly driven by its push into ​autonomous driving and robotics rather than earnings. reuters.com

Tesla’s Chinese-made electric vehicle sales jumped 39.4% from a year earlier ​in May. reuters.com

Tesla’s sales rose across several ​European markets in May. reuters.com

Tesla rolls out unsupervised robotaxis in Austin. reuters.com

Elon’s net worth poised to sail past $1 trillion after SpaceX IPO. cnbc.com

Hello Robot released the fourth iteration of its home assistance robot, Stretch, last month. techcrunch.com, foxnews.com

Hyundai is teaching the Boston Dynamics Atlas robot how to play soccer. qz.com

The US Army backs stealthy robotic trucks to transform military logistics. newatlas.com

Amazon is rolling out its next-generation warehouse robots that respond to natural language voice commands. cnbc.com

The Chinese Post Office deployed humanoid robots to sort packages at a major mail-processing facility in the southern city of Guangzhou. futurism.com

Linamar is building collaborative robots and working toward assembling humanoid robots from the ground up to expand beyond the automotive industry. autonews.com

Iran’s influence over the strategically vital Strait of Hormuz has inadvertently transformed the energy security debate, effectively casting fossil fuels rather than renewables as the primary source of vulnerability. cnbc.com

CATL expects energy storage to make up half of global sales by 2030. reuters.com

Waymo’s spent robotaxi batteries will be used as grid storage. techcrunch.com

Plug-in solar has long been popular in Europe, but rising energy costs and a raft of new state laws are boosting its popularity in the US. wsj.com

Porsche’s Cayenne Coupe Turbo will even make 911 owners nervous. The new Coupe version of the Cayenne is a little more compact but a lot more powerful, with a legitimate claim to be the most powerful Porsche of all time. theverge.com

Audi reveals its hybrid Nuvolari supercar as a replacement for the R8. electrek.co

Stellantis plans to produce three new electric and hybrid Peugeot models at ​its Mulhouse factory in eastern France. reuters.com

GM’s electric future depends on a new battery. techcrunch.com

How AI is speeding up GM’s product development. arstechnica.com

Dozens of workers took to the picket lines this week at an axle plant in Michigan that makes parts for some of GM’s most popular and profitable trucks. reuters.com

VW has spent billions developing cars “in China, for China.” It is about to find out if the Chinese will buy them. wsj.com

Carvana has been granted the option to invest in Slate Auto. techcrunch.com

Slate Auto gets serious about privacy for its bare-bones EV pickup. With no embedded modem, the Slate Truck is the antithesis of today’s connected cars. arstechnica.com

With its BEVs and PHEVs, Toyota captured about 30% of all of Canada’s Electric Vehicle Affordability Program (EVAP) rebates between mid-February and the end of April. autonews.com

The Donald met with auto industry folks to discuss right-to-repair. reuters.com

Unifor says it will kick off its next round of negotiations with the Detroit Three automakers by targeting Ford first. ctvnews.ca

The US is proposing strict new rules aimed at squeezing Chinese parts out of North America’s cars in bruising trade talks with Mexico. ft.com

A burglar used a Waymo while stealing yoga clothes in San Francisco this past January, and police have still not caught them. techcrunch.com

Automakers, retailers warn US memory-chip shortage is impacting prices. reuters.com

Uber published its 10th annual Lost & Found index on its website this week. uber.com