Ford's push to use artificial intelligence in vehicle development has run headfirst into a reality problem.The automaker says it has hired roughly 350 experienced engineers-many of them former Ford employees or longtime supplier specialists-after discovering that AI and automated quality systems weren't catching enough problems before vehicles reached production. Is that what we're blaming for Ford's record recall streak now?According to Bloomberg, Ford Chief Operating Officer Kumar Galhotra said the company had leaned too heavily on automated quality processes.AdvertisementAdvertisement"We were relying more and more on automated quality systems," Galhotra said. "We brought back technical specialists" whose job is to identify potential failures before parts ever make it onto the assembly line.how ford plans to profit from americas aging vehiclesFord's internal nickname for the returning experts is "gray beard" engineers, a nod to the decades of experience they bring. Their role is to spot the kinds of issues that software can miss because they've seen the empirical evidence of failures play out before.Charles Poon, Ford's vice president of vehicle hardware engineering, admitted the company overestimated what AI could accomplish on its own."Mistakenly we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and ingesting the design requirements that we had, that that would produce a high-quality product," Poon said.AdvertisementAdvertisementThat doesn't mean Ford is backing away from AI. The company plans to pair the technology with human experience, probably a choice that should have been made at the outset. The veteran engineers are helping train younger staff while also refining the AI systems themselves, teaching them to recognize failure patterns that weren't being identified.Ford says improvements in product quality have already reduced warranty and recall costs, creating "hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars" in savings.Earlier this week, Ford finished first among mainstream brands in the latest J.D. Power U.S. Initial Quality Study, marking a significant turnaround for a company that has spent the past several years battling recalls and quality concerns.While AI is becoming an increasingly valuable engineering tool, experience still matters. A computer can process millions of data points, but it can't replace decades spent watching parts fail in the real world. Empirical knowledge, grounded in real-world observations and results, remains king. We can't allow narrativizing and share prices to convince us that direct observation, testing, and sensory experience should take a backseat to computing power.Become an AutoGuide insider. Get the latest from the automotive world first by subscribing to our newsletter here.
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