Ford rehired – Ford says its effort to fix vehicle quality problems has required more than artificial intelligence. Executives say the company has rehired, promoted, or brought back about 350 experienced technical specialists to mentor staff, lead design reviews, and strengt
Ford’s quality comeback has a new ingredient—and it isn’t only code.
Executives at Ford told reporters this week that the company has hired. promoted. or brought back about 350 experienced technical specialists as part of a sweeping effort to fix vehicle-quality problems. The veteran engineers. Ford said. have helped mentor younger staff. lead design reviews. and improve the AI and automated quality tools used to catch defects before vehicles reach customers.
For Ford, the point wasn’t just that veterans could add experience. It was that they exposed a gap in what the company had tried before. Charles Poon. Ford’s vice president of vehicle hardware engineering. described AI as “a fantastic tool” but said it was “only as good as information you use to train it.” He added that Ford previously “mistakenly” believed that “by just introducing artificial intelligence and ingesting the design requirements that we had. that would produce a high-quality product.”.
Poon also blamed earlier shortcomings on Ford’s failure. in prior years. to preserve the knowledge of its most experienced engineers—some of whom left the company before their expertise was fully integrated into Ford’s systems. He said quality problems often surfaced at the boundaries between teams, where design, manufacturing, software, and hardware collide.
The stakes sit uncomfortably alongside Ford’s latest scoreboard win. A consumer data analytics firm, JD Power, named Ford the top mass-market brand in its latest initial-quality study, released Thursday. In the same rankings, Ford trailed only Porsche and Genesis overall. The study also showed Ford narrowly beating Lexus, which has long been among the strongest performers.
That result marks a turnaround Ford itself emphasized: three years ago, Ford ranked 15th out of 25 major automakers in the same study.
Yet the recall numbers continue to cast a long shadow over any quality victory. For years, Ford has faced headwinds on product quality. In 2025, Ford issued 152 recalls, nearly doubling the previous record set by General Motors in 2014, which was 77 safety bulletins. As of Thursday, Ford had issued 51 recalls this year, according to the NHTSA’s dashboard. That still placed Ford well ahead of the next-closest automaker, Chrysler, which had issued 19.
Ford executives characterized many of the continuing recall issues as tied to vehicles and platforms designed between 2013 and 2020. They called recalls a “lagging indicator.” They framed the JD Power win as proof that a new approach is taking hold and said internal data shows “clear improvement” in newer vehicles.
Still, the initial-quality study measures problems in new vehicles, not long-term durability. Ford executives’ own framing left room for doubt: it’s an early signal rather than a full verdict on whether Ford has solved its recall problem.
Ford has been working to change its manufacturing quality approach since 2023. Kumar Galhotra. Ford’s COO. said the company has more than doubled its technical specialist population since launching the quality reset. Those specialists now lead mandatory design reviews and look for failure points before parts ever reach the plant floor.
“They hunt for failure points before a part ever reaches the plant floor,” Galhotra said.
Ford also created an industrial system team intended to bring engineering, manufacturing, and supply chain closer together. Galhotra said the company previously relied too heavily on a “find and fix” approach—identifying problems after they appeared and trying to resolve them quickly. Now, Ford says it is aiming to prevent problems before they happen.
The company’s AI tools are part of that prevention push. Ford previously told Business Insider that it developed two bespoke AI-enhanced scanning tools that helped validate that cars were properly assembled before rolling off the lot. The tools, called AiTriz and MAIVs, both debuted in 2024.
Ford did not say whether the roughly 350 specialists rehired or promoted this week worked directly on those tools.
Taken together. Ford’s message is stark: the company is trying to make AI more reliable. not just more present—and it believes the missing link was the kind of knowledge that can’t simply be “ingested” from design requirements. The recall clock and the new-vehicle score still don’t line up perfectly. But Ford’s engineers, in its telling, are now being rebuilt around the boundaries where problems tend to emerge.
Ford quality problems AI vehicle hardware engineering Kumar Galhotra Charles Poon technical specialists JD Power initial quality study recalls NHTSA dashboard AiTriz MAIVs manufacturing quality