Commercial trucks wait to pass error inspection before the final step of the assembly process at Ford’s Ohio Assembly Plant in Sheffield Lake, Ohio. (Dustin Franz/Bloomberg)
key takeaways:
- Ford hired 350 experienced “gray beard” engineers over three years to fix quality problems, helping it rank as a top mainstream brand in J.D. Power’s latest survey.
- The shift relies on experienced engineers retraining AI tools and performing rigorous troubleshooting after automated systems alone failed to prevent costly faults, officials said.
- Ford expects recalls to decline, currently the highest in the industry, as its advance quality improvements take effect on new vehicles.
Ford Motor Company took an unusually human approach to fixing its stubborn quality problems: It brought back “gray beard” engineers to help train younger employees and reprogram artificial intelligence tools that weren’t working.
Over the past three years, Ford says it has hired 350 experienced engineers, many of them former employees and from other suppliers, to help tackle tough quality problems that have cost the automaker billions in losses. The results: Ford is the top mainstream brand in the latest J.D. Power Initial Quality Survey, released June 25.
“Artificial intelligence is a fantastic tool, but it’s only as good as the information you use to train it,” Charles Poon, Ford’s vice president of vehicle hardware engineering, told reporters on a call Wednesday. “Over the years, we haven’t paid as much attention as we should to the experience of our most knowledgeable engineers who have been with us through multiple product cycles.”
Those engineers were “at the center” of Ford’s efforts to address quality problems, said Chief Operating Officer Kumar Galhotra. They now run mandatory meetings that rigorously address quality issues, and they have reprogrammed AI tools to spot errors before they happen.
“We were relying more and more on automated quality systems” and were not getting the desired results, Galhotra said. “We brought back technical experts” and “They look for failure points before a part reaches the plant floor.”
The return of experienced engineers to Ford runs counter to the prevailing wisdom – and fear – that AI will replace all types of knowledge workers. But Ford found that machines could not replace experience.
🏆 After a 16-year drought, Ford is back on top as the No. 1 Mainstream Brand in the J.D. Power Initial Quality Study. What’s especially nice is that our infotainment quality saw the biggest leap ever!
We’re marking this milestone, but not giving up on continuous improvement… pic.twitter.com/xjG0FOz2JC
– Chris (@christooma) 25 June 2026
“Mistakenly we thought that simply introducing artificial intelligence and meeting the design requirements we had would result in a high-quality product,” Poon said. But “we recognized that to enhance some of our automation and machine learning and artificial intelligence tools we needed to ensure that they were trained by the most experienced individuals.”
As a result of the efforts of the old hands, Ford surpassed quality giants such as Toyota Motor Corp. and Honda Motor Co. in J.D. Power’s Bellwether survey, which measures a car’s quality during the first three months of ownership. Only luxury brands Porsche and Genesis remained ahead of Ford this year.
In last year’s survey, Ford ranked 10th among mainstream brands with quality below industry average. Its improvement was the greatest of any brand in this year’s survey.
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Three Ford models – the F-150 pickup, Super Duty truck and Mustang sports car – are ranked among the top in their respective categories by J.D. Power.
Despite the strong performance, Ford remains the most recalled automaker in America and the company has said it expects to incur $1 billion in warranty and material costs this year. Galhotra said the recalls are a “lagging indicator” of Ford’s quality and expects to see a decrease in the future.
“As we are doing more to prevent issues in the first place, we believe these recall numbers will continue to decrease with new vehicles,” Galhotra said. “I can’t give you a specific date when the number will come.”
