Why Ford Has So Many Recalls

[Frogdog1]

No further explanation needed by me.

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[robvas]

They made a bunch of money this quarter despite all the offshoring and penny pinching

why would they stop when the bean counters and MBAs run the show?

 

[Frogdog1]

They made a bunch of money this quarter despite all the offshoring and penny pinching

why would they stop when the bean counters and MBAs run the show?

Can't answer this question. I just saw a Ford related video and posted it. I once ran a Tier 1 supplier to Ford and a lot of what is said in the video is true. Ford is ruthless to work with or for. Want to be a Ford engineer, one needs to be prepared to work 15 hour days 7 days a week. That's why we found them so easy to recruit. They all live for the retirement system. I interviewed with Ford right out of college and told the plant manager at the end of my interviews that I didn't want to work for Ford. That ended that as I wished.

 

[Zig]

Recall = unintended extended warranty

 

[Wiley Marmot]

Caught a Ford vs GM recall/quality segment on one of the business channels earlier this week. Ford sure didn't compare very well with GM last year and so far this year.

From a personal perspective; I'm not complaining. The only recall on my GT is the BCM, and I haven't had ANY problem with leakage on my GT. Hope that trend continues!

 

[Zig]

Caught a Ford vs GM recall/quality segment on one of the business channels earlier this week. Ford sure didn't compare very well with GM last year and so far this year.

From a personal perspective; I'm not complaining. The only recall on my GT is the BCM, and I haven't had ANY problem with leakage on my GT. Hope that trend continues!

Wonder which uses more domestic parts ? Is it Qc or parts?

 

[Frogdog1]

Just a perspective, I spent quite a bit of time in the Louisville assembly plant.....41 acres under roof at the time. Their own hospital, police dept,, fire dept., cafeteria for eating, you name it.

By far, most of the parts in that plant were from Tier 1 suppliers like the one I ran. How would you like to run a place like that? My place was hard enough. Oh, and the plant manager, whom I knew, had to put up with the UAW. They eventually got rid of him by a purported "racial issue". Don't believe that for a second. He did a great job. It was the designers and higher level engineers in Detroit that screwed things up for the poor guy. He was in a lose/lose job. I knew he was in trouble when he called me asking how to do certain things having to do with quality. They were supposed to be teaching us. All business is hard. It's easy to be an employee and the higher you go, the tougher it gets. That's why I started two businessess and that isn't easy either. I just dissolved one business and govt. makes that harder to do than starting a business.

 

[SSuperDave]

6 years with Ford, total of 47 in the dealership service business including Cadillac and Lexus, and my main take away is the Ford cares noting about anything other than selling a car and seeing it go over the curb. The accountants dicate to the engineers, hampering what they can do. Example, the dry clutch trans issues af about 10 years ago. Internal memos from engineering said that this was a bad idea, a wet clutch system was needed, but it costs bit more than the dry system and so it was shot down. Other memos noted that the failures would be after the warranty ran out and accounting was ok with that. Several engineers quit over it. And all this contributed to Ford settling a $70M lawsuit over it. And I bet that Frogdog will agree that the UAW is a large part of the problem, hell that's another thread all its own. Someone here complained once about something, and I pointed out that these were mid priced domestic cars, built by union labor. They didn't like that very much, but its the truth.

They provide zero suport to the dealer body or the customer, and in every interaction with the customer, will make us look like the bad guy. Service managers have ZERO goodwill repair capability, hell even Jaguar left it to our discretion! They dictate how many rental cars we are allowed to have, of course we can BUY all we want from them at list price, which very few dealers can afford. They will tell us to get the customer a rental from Enterprise, then kick back the bill when we submit it, saying the repair didn't qualify. Their official stance is that Ford does not cover rentals, read your warranty book and see if they promise you anything, any where in there, they do not. In 2020, we ate almost $20K in unpaid rental bills before we were told to stop using outside sources. In short, every day with Ford is a struggle.

Well hell then, why do I stay, you might ask? I'm 4 years from retirement, I love the actual job itself, and the group that owns our dealer is great to work for. I make good money and am close to home, so I do the best I can every day for the customer, within the bounds of what I am able to.
If I were even 10 years younger, I'd be long gone from Ford, or transferred to our Cadillac store.

 

[Frogdog1]

6 years with Ford, total of 47 in the dealership service business including Cadillac and Lexus, and my main take away is the Ford cares noting about anything other than selling a car and seeing it go over the curb. The accountants dicate to the engineers, hampering what they can do. Example, the dry clutch trans issues af about 10 years ago. Internal memos from engineering said that this was a bad idea, a wet clutch system was needed, but it costs bit more than the dry system and so it was shot down. Other memos noted that the failures would be after the warranty ran out and accounting was ok with that. Several engineers quit over it. And all this contributed to Ford settling a $70M lawsuit over it. And I bet that Frogdog will agree that the UAW is a large part of the problem, hell that's another thread all its own. Someone here complained once about something, and I pointed out that these were mid priced domestic cars, built by union labor. They didn't like that very much, but its the truth.

They provide zero suport to the dealer body or the customer, and in every interaction with the customer, will make us look like the bad guy. Service managers have ZERO goodwill repair capability, hell even Jaguar left it to our discretion! They dictate how many rental cars we are allowed to have, of course we can BUY all we want from them at list price, which very few dealers can afford. They will tell us to get the customer a rental from Enterprise, then kick back the bill when we submit it, saying the repair didn't qualify. Their official stance is that Ford does not cover rentals, read your warranty book and see if they promise you anything, any where in there, they do not. In 2020, we ate almost $20K in unpaid rental bills before we were told to stop using outside sources. In short, every day with Ford is a struggle.

Well hell then, why do I stay, you might ask? I'm 4 years from retirement, I love the actual job itself, and the group that owns our dealer is great to work for. I make good money and am close to home, so I do the best I can every day for the customer, within the bounds of what I am able to.
If I were even 10 years younger, I'd be long gone from Ford, or transferred to our Cadillac store.

@Frogdog1 agrees 100% that the UAW is the root cause of MANY problems but as you say, that is another topic.

Separately, I've been totally over three public companies and one large private company. At times, iike any mature person would agree, that kind of career (and any career, with exceptions) was very satisfying, at other times I wondered why I worked with the people I worked with. At other times, I left and didn't work with those people any longer. Some goodbyes are very happy ones.

THAT, my friends is the nature of, by far, most careers if one is an "employee". I started two of my own companies and I was the boss. Even that has it's serious drawbacks. One has to look on the positive side of life in order to participate in life happily. That is the big takeaway of a lot of things. Think positive, be positive, be happy. Life brings problems to everyone, everyday. Think positive. Yes, it can be very hard to do. No, there are no perfect cars out there. My 2012 Honda comes real close. I can only hope for the Mustang. Thirteen year old Honda with no recalls and not one single repair. Such is life.

 

[Q6543]

I can add some context here..

recalls are literally part of the overall process at this point.
The mantra is keep lines running no matter what.. so understand that is THE CORE PRINCIPLE

Have a bad batch of components… keep the lines running, enter in the quality systems and repair offline later.

can’t figure out an issue…. Build build build until there is a solution

a lot of this came to light during Covid… vehicles were built without relays, chips, computers, steering wheels, seats,… hell WHEELS… they’d get built on temp spares

the accountants have calculated repairs after the fact are less expensive then slowing or stopping the line.

 

[Frogdog1]

I can add some context here..

recalls are literally part of the overall process at this point.
The mantra is keep lines running no matter what.. so understand that is THE CORE PRINCIPLE

Have a bad batch of components… keep the lines running, enter in the quality systems and repair offline later.

can’t figure out an issue…. Build build build until there is a solution

a lot of this came to light during Covid… vehicles were built without relays, chips, computers, steering wheels, seats,… hell WHEELS… they’d get built on temp spares

the accountants have calculated repairs after the fact are less expensive then slowing or stopping the line.

Oh, that's exactly what American car makers do is build and the problem cars go to a "hospital" area to get "fixed".

Contrast that with Toyota and Kawasaki, (both have been customers of mine) and ANYONE working on an assembly line is EXPECTED to stop the line if there is a problem, EVERYBODY is expected to fix the problem then and there, then the line is started up again. I have spent a lot of time with a Kawasaki president and the guy was a genius at getting things done with less movement, waste, and cost. Toyota invented it. Even Toyota makes mistakes, i.e. the first Tundra turbo V6. Humans will be humans.

 

[SSuperDave]

11 years at Leus and I have similar stories. It all boils down to "give a shit" Toyota has it, Ford does not. One of the VPs at Takata committed suicide when the airbag thing came up in the early teens, he was embarrassed that the problem happened on his watch. Thats a bit extreme unless you know the Japanese cuture, but there has to be some kind of middle ground between that and what we have. Focusing solely on share price (which ain't all that great anyway) and dancing to the union's tune sure ain't working.

 

[Stanzi]

lol because Ford is the worst automotive company in the world.

I mean they just don’t give a shit.

I ordered a keychain from the Ford Accessories website and they had to ship me another because they shipped me an EMPTY FREAKING KEYCHAIN BAG- SEALED NO LESS.

Every one of their employees must not give a crap. There is no other explanation.

how does an employee take an order, and physically put what you see in the photo in a box and ship it?

It starts at the top and goes all the way through to Customer Fulfillment.

but, alas, nobody else makes a V8 Manual for under $50k so here I am and here we are

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[SSuperDave]

Ford, where quality is job none...
I've opened a pristine sealed box, only to find a damaged part in it.

 

[MidwayJ]

Contrast that with Toyota and Kawasaki, (both have been customers of mine) and ANYONE working on an assembly line is EXPECTED to stop the line if there is a problem, EVERYBODY is expected to fix the problem then and there,

It's not always possible. My son-in-law used to work with recall programs at Toyota's US headquarters. They would sometimes discover they had received a defective batch of parts from a supplier, but the defects weren't visible at assembly. By the time the issue was known, vehicles had been sold by dealers and needed to be recalled. One interesting thing he mentioned is they would try to catch as many of the vehicles as possible before they reached the dealerships. It was cheaper to send people to fix them in railyards than paying the dealers to do it.

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