Ford Motor Company adopted the slogan “Quality is Job 1” in 1981. But quality, like the automaker employees who design, build and ensure it, goes through ups and downs. Since taking the helm in October 2020, CEO Jim Farley has embarked on a crusade to address construction issues prior to his tenure as well as the billions in warranty costs these problems create. Recent years have continued to deliver challenging lows, including Ford ends 2022 with multiple recalls of any automaker that sells vehicles in the U.S. During a question-and-answer period at Ford’s annual shareholder meeting last week, Farley and Ford Chairman Bill Ford answered questions presented online about current difficulties and the decisions that the two men are taking.
The second question asked (at 34:10) was: “Quality has been an issue for the past two years. What steps have been taken to address this issue?” Farley responded with, “For our management team, quality is our number one priority. And our overall quality is improving today. , but more importantly, what we expect of ourselves. We are starting to see our initial quality improve dramatically in North America. We are taking a number of actions, as you would expect, to eliminate any defects in the first place. And we are totally focused on finding and solving the problems that arise.The way we represent this within the company is that we always want to put quality first because that is the most fundamental commitment to our customers and our customers, we want to treat them like family.It requires a lot of end-to-end changes, from our supply chain, to our manufacturing and engineering system, to the way we test, and also how we find root cause and the we solve in all the different disciplines of the industrial system”.
Then he used the new Super Duty to provide an example of what that range of action looks like. Prototypes are driven more road miles in the real world and number of truck put through trailer the tests were tripled. Additional checks are carried out on the assembly lines in both the factories that build the Super Duty and AI-powered tech monitors “to detect quality issues that are not visible to the human eye.” Every day, workers take 100 trucks off the line for “a 25-mile shakedown before delivery” to “examine [their] performance like a customer might.” More than 28,000 Super Duty trucks have met the challenge so far.
Farley concluded the question by stating, “Simply put, you won’t see us launch the product until it meets or exceeds the highest quality standards we’ve ever had. This is what we’re doing for all vehicles, as we’re going through now for (the new) Mustang and more exciting products to come.”
Quality improvements take a long time to fix and a long time to demonstrate — great recalls for models 10 years old or older they are not usual now. Farley said the same last year when he tells former Ford engineers, “Fixing quality is my number one priority… It’s the most important initiative in the entire company. And it will take several years.” We won’t know the value of all these big words for a while, but let’s hope Farley is right.
On a brighter note, Farley and Ford answered questions on topics ranging from Maverick production issues TO hydrogen vehicles and why the company doesn’t build one challenger for the Chevrolet Corvettes. In response to the latter, Ford said: “Are you kidding? We have the Mustang, which I think is by far the best sports car. … It’s convenient. It is faster than all exits. It’s as good as it gets.”
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