Overview
- Over the past three years Ford has rehired, promoted or brought back roughly 350 veteran engineers to restore tacit knowledge that left the company before it could be captured by automated tools.
- Company executives acknowledged they relied too heavily on AI and automated inspection and that those systems missed complex, real‑world edge cases that experienced engineers would have caught.
- Ford has created a 40‑member software quality‑assurance team and run more than 100,000 AI validation tests to retrain models and make automated checks more reliable.
- The company links these changes to recent quality gains, including a No. 1 ranking among mainstream brands in J.D. Power’s Initial Quality Survey, though it recorded 152 recalls in 2025 and 51 so far in 2026 tied to legacy production.
- Ford says it will adopt a hybrid model that pairs human judgment with improved AI and closer engineering, manufacturing and supply‑chain review, even as long‑term durability and past recall volumes remain unresolved and likely to draw closer scrutiny.