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What’s the driving factor in Ford changing it processes to avoid recalls? A. Public embarrassment…………Bssst B. Fear that customers may never return………..Bsst C. A $2 billion enema every quarter that destroys profit………….Ding Ding Ding. Seems like Ford only changes when the pain of financial loss is so incredibly overwhelming. That applies to Warranty costs, bad product investments and failed projects/business ventures. All we can hope for is that Ford gets on top of the root cause of those losses and stems the bleeding.

Killing Vauxhall wouldn't save much money on its own. Opel and Vauxhall are essentially one brand with minor differences in badging. The main difference is steering wheel location. Opels are sold on the continent, Vauxhalls are sold in the British Isles.

While price is a concern and people complain about the Mustang moniker, as a Mach E customer on his second Mach E (my Rally arrived this week to replace my 2021 Premium), one of the things that I appreciate most is that it's essentially an conventional car that happens to have an electric powertrain. While I don't have and would never have a Tesla product, I'm very acquainted with them due to various benchmarking activities that I participate in. If "EV" means "austere," then I don't want that type of EV, despite how many idiots are suckered into Elon's reality distortion field. If you try to re-imagine an EV to a "Smart" car, then I don't want it. Make it a car that I'd like anyway as an ICE, and you've got a winner. I love my Mach E. It doesn't do 100% of what I want out of a car, but there's not a car in existence that does. It's why I have, for example, a trailer tow vehicle and Home Depot runner and family road trip vehicle – it supplements the Mach E.

Exactly! Strategic discipline has been an issue with Ford management for decades.

Agreed. The pieces that seem different to me now is the change in compensation for management and all the outsiders on the model E side including the skunkworks team. This should lead to new design, engineering and manufacturing processes for model E with higher quality baked in from the start. I think they’ll stick with it as long as costs continue to go down and profits stay up. The question is what happens if profits and/or sales start to fall - will they revert to their old ways? I hope not.

I have been around a long time. I owned a 2000 Focus and currently own a 2012 Focus and 2014 Transit Connect I love(d) these vehicles. There is a pattern with Ford, where recalls and quality issues spike and Management promises changes, only to see another spike in a few years with more commitments to changes. I don't remember a time when Ford was #1 in initial quality. Quality improves after the spikes but never to be the best in world. Systemic issues with Ford seem to stem from the need for short term cost reductions, short term thinking, and volatile product cadences. I hope this is fixed with Farley, but I will believe it when I see it.

A couple of thoughts, and it's not meant to be an apologist, but 1) Ford is hardly the only company to have invested billions in EVs with little to show for it.....I think where Ford gets dinged is that it decided to purposely break out EVs in their results, whereas competitors just have it in their overall numbers.........which looks better for you? Ford made $2.59 billion overall OR Ford Blue made $1.17B, Ford Pro made $2.56B, but EV lost $1.14B. 2) Changes should've been made earlier for quality purposes, but at least changes have been made that seem to be paying off so far. I'll agree that Oakville is a bad mis-step, and how can you blame him for the VW move when that was done by furniture man (can't even remember his name)?

Can’t disagree that he waited too long to make real changes for quality improvement. I suspect he tried to make incremental changes while still pushing aggressive product schedules and cost cutting before realizing that wasn’t enough. Now it seems on the surface that there is a commitment to quality over sales as evidenced by the extended launch holds. And changing the compensation KPIs is a huge step but we’ll have to see if they keep up that commitment or backslide. I also agree he mismanaged SOME of the EV stuff like the Oakville debacle and Rivian and VW partnerships along with ever changing product plans. But I think T3 and BOC is absolutely the right move and he did create the skunkworks team which might turn out to be a genius move. We’ll have to wait and see. But to say it’s a failure because of the model E startup costs is short sighted.

Hard to disagree with any of it

I'd like to see Ford hire a 3rd party company to evaluate their product development and manufacturing processes to find solutions to this stubborn problem. I don't think this can be fixed internally.

It’s terrible especially if you extrapolate it to a full year. Thats probably $2B that they could be spending on new vehicles or plants or other Improvements. The only good news is this was for 2021 vehicles so hopefully it will improve steadily as a result of the changes made in the last year. Warranty costs and not having enough production capacity are Ford’s 2 biggest issues.

So finally got some time to take a look at Ford C2 sales in China and all it does is raise more questions in my mind about business choices there. The most recent entry I could find was 2022, which is useful because it includes the new products that came out: 60K Mondeo 26K Edge 15K Nautilus 10K Lincoln Z 6.8K Evos So roughly 118K in product spilt between 2 major top hats with an additional 2-3 changes per top hat-the Mondeo and Z are pretty much the same product with different bits of plastic, while the Evos, Edge and Nautilus have significant changes Meanwhile in the NA market-the Edge and Nautilus outsold the whole lot in 2023 (2022 production was limited by COVID issues) with a combined total of 130K units. I get the EV thing, but at the same time with some minor sheet metal changes you could have a new Edge and sell the Evos as a Subaru competitor for additional volume. Just looking at Ford's Chinese sales numbers, it makes me wonder why they stay there, but I guess their JVs sell much better then they do alone.