Ford says automation errors forced return to veteran engineering know-how

Ford says its use of AI and automated systems in vehicle design and production contributed to quality problems, forcing the company to bring in experienced technicians, including some former employees, to correct errors linked to robots. The admission matters because it came as Ford marked its first No. 1 position in 16 years in J.D. Power’s initial quality ranking among mainstream automakers.

Charles Poon, Ford’s vice president of vehicle hardware engineering, told reporters this week that the company misjudged how much automation could do on its own. According to Poon, Ford believed that adding artificial intelligence and changing design requirements would be enough to produce high-quality vehicles.

“Mistakenly, we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and adjusting the design requirements that we had, that that would produce a high-quality product,” Poon said, according to The Verge.

Lost knowledge became a quality problem

Poon said some of Ford’s most experienced workers left before the company had fully captured their knowledge in its automated systems. Those employees had built up expertise across several vehicle-development cycles, and Ford later found that the systems did not contain enough of that know-how.

The company’s experience shows the limits of applying AI to complex manufacturing and design work without enough reliable training data. Ford’s view, as described by Poon, is that AI can be useful but depends heavily on the information used to train the models.

Ford also concluded that long-serving engineers had practical knowledge that was not easy to replace with software. The company had to rely on experienced technicians, in some cases bringing back former workers, to address mistakes created by automated processes.

The episode points to a broader risk for manufacturers adding AI and robotics to production: automation can speed work, but it can also repeat or create errors if the underlying assumptions are flawed. Ford’s quality issues, according to Poon’s account, stemmed from both weaker-than-expected automated systems and the loss of institutional knowledge.

Ford is discussing those problems while highlighting a better result in J.D. Power’s initial quality ranking. The automaker was named the top mainstream brand in the ranking for the first time in 16 years, a milestone that Ford is using to show progress after problems tied to its production and design processes.

This story draws on original reporting from The Verge.