This Automaker Paid $4.8 Billion to Fix Its Cars in a Single Year. Here’s Its Unexpected Solution to Quality Control Issues.

In 2023, Ford spent $4.8 billion fixing customers’ cars, a 15% increase from 2022. Last July, it set a record with 90 recalls in a single year, including an estimated $570 million charge tied to nearly 700,000 crossover vehicles.

Those numbers have triggered a culture change around quality — and the company’s efforts are paying off. As of this week, Ford ranks No. 1 among mainstream brands in the latest JD Power Initial Quality Survey, up from 10th place last year. The survey asks new vehicle owners about problems experienced in the first 90 days of ownership. 

Ford CEO Jim Farley recently told Bloomberg TV that the focus on making quality vehicles is showing up in the financials. “We’re seeing our warranty coverages come down. We’re seeing our recall costs come down,” he noted, adding that these improvements are “contributing to literally hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars of a tailwind for Ford on cost.” 

Hiring human engineers

Ford made the decision to hire 350 “gray beards,” or experienced engineers, over the past three years to help with its quality control issues. The move is a bet that human experience is the key to making AI pay off, according to a recent Fortune report. Ford is using veteran engineers to mentor younger staff and retrain AI systems that aren’t functioning properly. 

“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, recently told reporters, per Fortune. “Over prior years, we didn’t pay as much attention as we should have to the experience of our most knowledgeable engineers that have been with us through many product cycles.”

Ford has embedded these engineers in the company as quality gatekeepers and mentors. A Ford representative told Fortune that the “gray beards” serve as “internal auditors,” running mandatory weekly peer design reviews to identify and eliminate potential failure points.

“By combining AI’s processing power and pattern recognition with decades of human engineering experience, we’re identifying potential issues and designing quality into our vehicles from day one while teaching the next generation to prevent problems before they ever start,” the representative said in a statement. 

Focusing on AI plus humans

Ford is careful to stress that it is not abandoning AI. Instead, it is reforming the relationship between automation and human expertise. The company told Fortune that AI remains “very important” to its quality gains, but only “in tandem with deep technical expertise,” which makes the combination “powerful.” 

One example is an AI vision system built on off-the-shelf smartphones that inspects components such as electrical connections on the assembly line. Ford described the setup as “an extra set of highly precise eyes” that performs consistent quality checks and alerts operators so they can correct problems before components move down the line. The system now runs in 33 plants, with more than 1,000 cameras performing millions of inspections.