‘I Saw Ford Fall In And Out Of Love With Quality Four Times’ Admits Ford CEO Jim Farley

There was so much news from this week’s Automotive News Congress that I decided to break out something Ford CEO Jim Farley said about quality, which was an admission that the company has had a difficult time staying focused on it.

“I saw Ford fall in and out of love with quality four times,” he said, talking to Automotive News Publisher KC Crain. Farley isn’t a Ford lifer, having jumped to the company in 2007 from a long turn at Toyota, including with the much-missed Scion brand. That was right before the Global Financial Crisis and Ford, barely, avoiding bankruptcy.

The modern roots of Ford’s quality concerns go way back to the 1980s, when the brand launched a series of ads stating that at Ford “Quality is Job 1.” This was a reaction both to the rise of Japanese automakers and a sense that the company’s cars lived up to the derisive Fix or Repair Daily backronym.

As Autoweek writes, the original first priority for car companies in Detroit was to try and get cars out on time with less concern for how quickly they came back. Then something changed.

In 1978, a year before he became CEO of the company, Ford President Philip Caldwell wrote a note to himself before a meeting: “quality – number one.” Caldwell later decreed at the management meeting, Main wrote, that quality would become a new priority for the automaker.

Donald Petersen, Ford’s president in the early 1980s, who later became CEO and chairman, also embraced the quality push and the slogan was soon plastered across Ford. A 1982 commercial turned the words into a jingle and featured workers describing specific quality updates on vehicles. The phrase also appeared in print ads, like one that boldly placed “Bug Killers” atop a Ford assembly line. “Nobody wants to buy a car that hasn’t had the bugs worked out,” the 1982 poster read. Lining the bottom of the ad was the Job 1 slogan.

Even popular slogans tend to run their course, so it’s incredible that Ford managed to keep the same line for 17 years. I grew up assuming that was the only Ford tagline.

Ford moved away from the verbiage and, depending on who you ask, away from quality. I’m not sure I can pinpoint each of the four times he’s talking about it, though the most recent time is almost certainly the Jim Hackett era of Ford, which Farley is now having to clean up. Cars from Hackett’s time have ended up needing massive and ongoing recalls, leading Farley to make quality a priority yet again. Is it working?

Earlier this year, Ford did perform better than Lexus in JD Power’s Initial Quality Survey, coming in third behind Porsche and Genesis. While IQS is focused on just the first 90 days of ownership, that’s still a massive improvement from the company’s 14th position the year before.

Farley says he’s not content with that:

“I don’t see any comfort at Ford at any level with what we’ve achieved in JD Power’s IQS,” Farley told Automotive News Publisher KC Crain. “Our [dynamometers] are literally running 24 hours a day, seven days a week, breaking every powertrain we have or plan to announce in the next few years. Across the whole board, I just see a team absolutely dedicated to not disappointing the customer, and I haven’t seen that really since I left Toyota.”

Ford’s quality turnaround required a complete overhaul of company culture, focused on accountability, controlling costs and listening to experts, Farley said.

“It required new people — a lot of new people,” Farley said. “It required a different culture around lean [manufacturing], and it required a complete obsession with the details.”

Some of this involved hiring back the same people Ford assumed it could replace with AI.

As with anything reputational, earning the trust of a customer takes years and years, whereas losing that trust can happen in a moment. With the launch of the Ford Fathom, the company will have another chance to show it can take a big swing and not trip on the way to first base.

Top photo: Ford