Yahoo Autos Ford CEO Jim Farley again talks build quality — Super Duty trucks get super duty testing
Ford Motor Company adopted the slogan "Quality is Job 1" in 1981. But quality, like the automaker employees in charge of designing, building, and guaranteeing it, goes through highs and lows. Since taking the helm in October 2020, CEO Jim Farley's been on a crusade to address build issues that predate his tenure as well as the billions in warranty costs those issues create. The last few years have continued to provide challenging lows, including Ford ending 2022 with more recalls than any automaker selling vehicles in the U.S. During a Q&A period at Ford's annual shareholder meeting last week, Farley and Ford Chairman Bill Ford took questions submitted online about current difficulties and decisions the two men are making.
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 answered with, "For our management team, quality is our number one priority. And our overall quality today is improving. However, we're still not at the world-class levels that, not only our customers expect, but, more importantly, what we expect out of ourselves. We are starting to see our initial quality improve markedly in North America. We're taking a range of actions, as you would expect, to eliminate any defects in the first place. And we are totally focused on finding and fixing issues that do come up. The way we portray this inside the company is, we always want to put quality first because that's the most fundamental commitment to our customers, and our customers, we want to treat like family. It requires a lot of end-to-end changes, from our supply chain, our manufacturing and engineering system, to the way we test, and also the way we find root cause and solve that across all the different disciplines in the industrial system."
