Ford rehired – Ford says it rehired hundreds of experienced auto troubleshooters after an overreliance on automated quality systems and AI contributed to costly reliability problems. The shift is already showing up in warranty and recall costs, and Ford has rebounded to firs
By the time Ford decided to pull “gray beard” engineers back into its workflow, the message inside the company was blunt: computers weren’t cutting it.
Over the last three years. Ford folded 350 “gray beard” engineers into its workforce. including many former Ford workers brought in to help troubleshoot the company’s infamous reliability woes. The move comes after Ford concluded that it had leaned too heavily on automated quality systems—using AI and automated processes to spot problems—only to run into expensive gaps.
Ford COO Kumar Galhotra said the carmaker “had been relying more and more on automated quality systems. ” but AI wasn’t meeting Ford’s standards for reliability. With computers not doing the job. the company “brought back technical specialists [who can] hunt for failure points before a part ever reaches the plant floor. ” Galhotra said.
Ford is not framing the decision as a rejection of technology. Instead. it treats the rehire as a correction—putting seasoned human experience back at the center of how reliability problems are found and fixed. Ford CEO Jim Farley told Bloomberg that warranty coverages are coming down and recall costs are coming down. creating a “tailwind” of hundreds of millions of dollars in saved costs.
That emphasis on experience is echoed by Ford Vice President of Vehicle Hardware Engineering Charles Poon. who said. “Artificial intelligence is a fantastic tool. but it’s only as good as the information you use to train it.” Poon added that “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.”.
The reliability reversal is showing up in rankings and in dollars. In the new 2026 JD Power Initial Quality Study—measuring car reliability in its first three months—Ford won the top spot for a mainstream brand. It’s a sharp reversal from Ford’s 10th place finish last year. and Ford even beat out Toyota and Honda. brands that are long associated with reliability.
The stakes behind the correction have been clear for a while. Ford set new records for the most safety recalls in a calendar year in 2025. after problem after problem surfaced across its lineup of cars and trucks. The cost of warranty repairs has strained the company in recent years. with issues ranging from worries about cracked fuel injectors to the threat of vehicles stalling out on the road. In 2023 alone, Ford paid $4.8 billion to fix problems with customers’ vehicles—triple the industry average.
Even as recalls rose broadly across the U.S. auto market, Ford stood out as the most-recalled carmaker. In response to quality problems, Ford began holding back redesigned models for up to six weeks before release to make time for additional quality checks, a process led by its human workforce.
The story inside Ford, as Poon describes it, starts with a mistake in expectations. “Mistakenly. we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and ingesting the design requirements that we had. that that would produce a high-quality product. ” Poon said. Ford later realized its automated systems and AI tools couldn’t operate without the kind of judgment that comes from people who have lived through many product cycles.
The next phase is about timing. Ford expects recall costs to plummet in the coming years after combining the rehiring of veteran engineers with added layers of quality control, but the improvements are expected to lag somewhat behind recent changes.
Already, the numbers and rankings Ford is pointing to suggest the company’s most expensive reliability headaches have become a prompt to redesign its process—this time with experienced specialists in the driver’s seat.
Ford AI automated quality systems reliability engineers recalls warranty costs JD Power Initial Quality Study Kumar Galhotra Jim Farley Charles Poon
So Ford fired “gray beards” then had to rehire them… shocking.
I don’t get how AI “stumbles” like a person but whatever. If warranty and recall costs are going down, maybe it’s just luck? Computers been doing stuff for years.
They’re blaming AI but maybe the real problem is the parts supply chain? Like, if they’re using cheaper components the engineers can’t “hunt failure points” fast enough. Also “gray beard” engineers sounds rude, why not just say experienced techs.
Ford bringing back veterans like it’s 1990 lol. But didn’t they already have computers and sensors anyway? Sounds like they trained the AI wrong or the data was garbage. Either way I’m still not buying a new Ford until they stop doing recalls every time.