Ford is now No. 1 in JD Power’s initial quality ranking among mainstream automakers. That’s the good news. The backstory is less flattering: the company had to bring back former employees to fix mistakes made by the automated systems it had bet on to replace them.
Ford VP of vehicle hardware engineering Charles Poon was blunt about it: “Mistakenly, we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and adjusting the design requirements that we had, that would produce a high-quality product.” It didn’t. Some of Ford’s most experienced engineers left before their institutional knowledge could be transferred into the automated systems. The AI, trained on incomplete data, produced errors that junior engineers couldn’t catch.
Ford hired, promoted, or brought back over 350 experienced engineers to rebuild that missing expertise layer. Their job: mentor younger engineers, improve data collection, and retrain the automated systems that had been running on bad inputs.
Find-and-fix wasn’t working
COO Kumar Galhotra said the company’s quality approach had become too fragmented. Different departments operated in silos, relying on a “find and fix” philosophy — identify defects after they appear, correct them fast. That fixes symptoms. It doesn’t prevent problems.
Ford now says it’s shifting to prevention-focused quality, with software and digital teams working directly with vehicle engineering and manufacturing. A new 40-person software QA team has the sole job of catching issues before they ship. The automaker added over 100,000 AI-powered tests to identify edge cases. Automated testing means late software changes can be rapidly revalidated.
The tension
But Ford can’t just iterate like a software company. Cars operate in safety-critical environments. You can’t push a half-baked OTA update and promise to fix it later. Poon acknowledged this directly — vehicles aren’t smartphones. Software has to work from delivery day one.
Ford still leads the industry in recalls. Its quality ratings have been sliding for years. The JD Power ranking suggests the turnaround is real, but it came at a cost: the company had to admit that replacing human expertise with automation before it was ready created more problems than it solved.
