Ford ranked first among mass-market brands in the 2026 JD Power Initial Quality Study with a score of 152 PP100, an improvement of 41 points from the prior year. It was the biggest year-over-year gain among mainstream brands and Ford’s first time at the top in 16 years. The result followed an internal rethink: the company said its growing reliance on automated quality systems had pushed its quality process off course.
Automation moved fast, but veteran judgment was missing
Charles Poon, Ford’s vice president of vehicle hardware engineering, said on a media call that artificial intelligence is only as good as the information used to train it. Ford’s problem was not the use of AI itself, but the fact that the company rolled out automated inspection systems without feeding in one of its most valuable inputs: the field judgment accumulated by senior engineers across multiple product generations and years on the factory line.
Poon said Ford had assumed that introducing AI and loading existing design-requirement data into the system would be enough to produce higher-quality vehicles. The company later concluded that automation and machine-learning tools had to be trained by its most experienced people. Over the past three years, Ford brought back 350 veteran engineers, many of them former employees who had retired or moved to suppliers.
The returning engineers were put at the center of the quality overhaul
Chief Operating Officer Kumar Galhotra said those engineers became the core of Ford’s quality transformation. They now lead mandatory quality meetings, review potential defects in a structured way, and reset how AI tools operate so that likely failure points can be caught before parts even reach the plant. Galhotra said Ford had become increasingly dependent on automated quality systems without getting the results it wanted, and that bringing technical experts back changed where problems were intercepted.
The ranking shift was sharp. In the 2025 JD Power IQS, Ford was 10th among mass-market brands and scored below the industry average. A year later, it moved past Toyota and Honda to take the top spot in the mainstream category, trailing only Porsche and Genesis in the broader standings.
Seven of 10 Ford models placed in the top three of their segments
Of the 10 models included in the study, seven Ford vehicles finished in the top three of their segments, the highest share among automakers. The F-150 pickup, Super Duty truck and Mustang each ranked first in their categories. CEO Jim Farley told Bloomberg TV that warranty expense and recall costs were both declining, and that together they had contributed “hundreds of millions of dollars” in positive cost impact. Ford’s company-wide target this year is to cut $1 billion in costs.
The episode does not read as a simple case of humans replacing AI. Ford’s account points to a narrower issue: systems trained on incomplete inputs kept reproducing old problems. Once experienced engineers were put back into the loop, the tools began identifying issues before they reached production.