GoKawiilis transportation editor with 10+ years of experience who covers EVs, public transportation, and aviation. His work has appeared in The New York Daily News and City & State.
Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
To celebrate its new status as No. 1 in JD Power’s initial quality ranking among mainstream automakers, Ford is opening up about the challenges it has faced in recent years, especially around its reliance on automated systems in production and design. It turns out that those automated systems were not as robust as previously assumed, requiring Ford to hire experienced technicians — sometimes bringing back former employees — to correct errors made by the company’s robots.
In Ford’s view, AI is both powerful and prone to pitfalls. Its effectiveness depends entirely on the quality of the data used to train the AI models. In addition, the automaker underestimated the value of the institutional knowledge accumulated by its more veteran engineers who had worked through multiple vehicle-development cycles. And this combination of phenomena led to a drop in quality in Ford’s vehicles.
“Mistakenly, we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and adjusting the design requirements that we had, that that would produce a high-quality product,” said Charles Poon, VP of vehicle hardware engineering, in a briefing this week with reporters.
“Mistakenly, we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and adjusting the design requirements that we had, that that would produce a high-quality product.” — Charles Poon, Ford’s VP of vehicle hardware engineering
According to Poon, some of the company’s most experienced personnel left before all of their accumulated knowledge could be fully transferred into Ford’s automated systems. That necessitated bringing back some of those employees to retrain those systems, or in some cases, mentor younger engineers who were currently struggling to maintain Ford’s vehicle quality. Poon said that Ford hired, promoted, or brought back over 350 experienced engineers to rebuild that layer of expertise. In addition to guiding younger engineers, they’ve also been tasked with improving the data collection and AI training that underpin Ford’s automated systems.
“That’s where some of our most experienced engineers have had experience solving and identifying those problems before they creep into the system,” Poon said.
Ford currently leads the industry in the number of recalls, and its quality ratings have slipped over the past several years. Those challenges became more pronounced recently, with the difficulties associated with the launches of the Explorer and Aviator, supply-chain disruptions during the covid pandemic, and the noticeable growth in the number of its vehicle recalls.
According to Ford’s COO Kumar Galhotra, the automaker eventually concluded that its approach to quality had become too fragmented. Different departments operated in silos, and the company relied heavily on a “find and fix” philosophy that focused on identifying defects after they appeared and correcting them as quickly as possible. While that approach could address immediate problems, it did not prevent those problems from occurring in the first place.
... continue reading