Ford Rehired 350 Veteran Engineers After AI Failed to Catch Defects. Now It Leads JD Power Quality Rankings.

Ford Bet on AI, Skipped the Knowledge Transfer, and Got Burned

Ford's quality crisis had a simple cause that took years to fully acknowledge: the company automated its quality-assurance systems before its most experienced engineers had transferred what they knew into those systems.

Charles Poon, Ford's VP of vehicle hardware engineering, put it plainly to reporters this week, as quoted by Business Insider: "Mistakenly, we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and ingesting the design requirements that we had, that would produce a high-quality product."

He added that quality problems consistently appeared at the boundaries between teams, where design, manufacturing, software, and hardware collide. These zones were precisely where automated systems trained on incomplete data were least equipped to catch failures.

350 Engineers, Not a Token Gesture

Starting in 2023, Ford launched a deliberate quality reset. The company hired, promoted, or brought back roughly 350 experienced technical specialists, according to Business Insider. Some were former Ford employees. Others came from suppliers.

Ford COO Kumar Galhotra told journalists the company had more than doubled its technical specialist population since that reset began. Those specialists now lead mandatory design reviews and hunt for failure points before any part reaches the plant floor, according to Business Insider.

The company also built a dedicated 40-person software quality assurance team and added more than 100,000 AI-powered automated tests to catch edge cases and revalidate software changes late in development, according to The Next Web.

So Ford didn't retreat from AI. It rebuilt the foundation the AI was sitting on.

The JD Power Number

The results are measurable. JD Power's 2026 Initial Quality Study, which measures problems reported by owners in the first 90 days of ownership, ranked Ford first among mainstream brands with a score of 152 problems per 100 vehicles, ahead of Nissan and Buick, according to The Next Web. Ford trailed only Porsche and Genesis in the overall rankings. The F-150, Mustang, and Super Duty each won best-in-segment for the second straight year.

Three years ago, Ford ranked 15th out of 25 major automakers in the same study, according to Business Insider.

Ford CEO Jim Farley credited the turnaround with delivering "hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars" in reduced warranty and recall costs, according to TechCrunch.

The Recall Record Complicates the Story

The JD Power win doesn't erase the larger recall problem. As of late June 2026, Ford had issued 51 recalls covering more than 11 million vehicles in the U.S. this year, according to NHTSA data cited by The Next Web. That is more than double Chrysler, which had issued 19, making Ford the U.S. recall leader by a wide margin. In 2025, Ford issued 152 recalls total, nearly doubling the previous U.S. record set by General Motors in 2014.

Ford executives acknowledged the gap but framed it as a timing problem. They told reporters that most current recalls trace back to vehicles and platforms designed between 2013 and 2020, calling recalls a "lagging indicator" of problems created before the quality reset. They argue internal data shows "clear improvement" in vehicles designed under the new process. The Initial Quality Study measures new vehicles, not aging ones. If the quality reset genuinely took hold in 2023, the recall tail from older platforms will continue dragging the headline number for years regardless of what's happening on newer designs.

The Harder Question Ford Won't Answer Directly

The strongest criticism of Ford's situation isn't that AI failed. It concerns how Ford created the problem in the first place.

Ford has shed roughly 5,300 salaried positions since its 2020 employment peak, part of a broader contraction that has eliminated more than 20,000 white-collar jobs across Detroit's automakers, according to The Next Web. Poon was notably vague about why experienced engineers left in the first place. Futurism noted that CEO Jim Farley has publicly predicted AI "is going to replace literally half of all white-collar workers in the US" — a claim his own company's quality episode now makes harder to defend without qualification.

Ford cut experienced engineers, watched quality degrade, then rehired 350 of them and credited the AI-plus-human model as the insight. Critics are entitled to ask whether the "insight" was simply undoing a bad cost-cutting call.

Ford has NOT addressed that framing directly in any public statement reviewed for this article.

What Comes Next

The Initial Quality Study is an early-ownership snapshot, not a long-term durability verdict. Ford's dependability rankings, which measure older vehicles, have slipped in recent years according to Futurism. Whether the quality reset holds up in those longer-horizon studies and whether the recall rate on new platforms eventually falls remain unresolved questions. NHTSA's dashboard will provide a running tally.