Ford staged a quality comeback. The automaker credits part of the turnaround to pairing AI with something more old-school: veteran engineers.
Executives at Ford told reporters this week that the company had hired, promoted, or brought back about 350 experienced technical specialists as part of a sweeping effort to fix vehicle-quality problems. Those engineering veterans have helped mentor younger staff, lead design reviews, and improve the AI and automated quality tools Ford uses to catch defects before vehicles reach customers, they said.
They also offered a striking admission: AI and automation were not enough on their own.
"Artificial intelligence is a fantastic tool, but it's only as good as information you use to train it," Charles Poon, Ford's vice president of vehicle hardware engineering, said. "Mistakenly, we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and ingesting the design requirements that we had, that would produce a high-quality product."
Poon said Ford had not done enough in prior years to preserve the knowledge of its most experienced engineers, some of whom left the company before their expertise was fully integrated into Ford's systems. He said quality problems often showed up at the boundaries between teams, where design, manufacturing, software, and hardware collide.
Quality win, recall hangover #
The comments came as Ford celebrated a major milestone.
Consumer data analytics firm JD Power named Ford the top mass-market brand in its latest initial-quality study, trailing only Porsche and Genesis overall, according to the study released Thursday. Ford narrowly beat Lexus, which has long been one of the strongest performers in the rankings.
That's a big turnaround. Just three years ago, Ford ranked 15th out of 25 major automakers in the same study.
For years, Ford has faced headwinds on its product quality. In 2025, Ford issued 152 recalls, nearly doubling the previous record set by General Motors in 2014 with 77 safety bulletins. As of Thursday, Ford had issued 51 recalls this year, according to the NHTSA's dashboard. That's still more than double Chrysler, the next-closest automaker, which had issued 19.
Ford executives said many of the continued recall issues are tied to vehicles and platforms designed between 2013 and 2020, calling recalls a "lagging indicator." They framed the JD Power win as proof that a new approach is taking hold, and said internal data shows "clear improvement" in newer vehicles.
Still, the initial-quality study measures problems in new vehicles, not long-term durability, making it an early signal rather than a full verdict on whether Ford has solved its recall problem.
Ford says it changed how it catches problems #
Ford launched its quality reset in 2023.
In that time, Kumar Galhotra, Ford's COO, said the company has more than doubled its technical specialist population. Those specialists now lead mandatory design reviews and look for failure points before parts ever reach the plant floor.
"They hunt for failure points before a part ever reaches the plant floor," he said.
The company also created an industrial system team to bring engineering, manufacturing, and supply chain closer together. Before that approach, Galhotra said Ford had previously relied too heavily on a "find and fix" approach — identifying problems after they appeared and trying to resolve them quickly.
Now, Ford says it is trying to prevent problems before they happen.
Ford previously told Business Insider that it had developed two bespoke AI-enhanced scanning tools that helped validate that cars were properly assembled before rolling off the lot. The tools, called AiTriz and MAIVs, both debuted in 2024.
While Ford has previously said the tools are helping improve product quality, the company did not say whether the 350 specialists worked directly on them.