Ford is No. 1 Mainstream Brand in J.D. Power Initial Quality Study for First Time Since 2010

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Ford is No. 1 Mainstream Brand in J.D. Power Initial Quality Study for First Time Since 2010

Ford is the new gold standard for mass market new vehicle quality in America, ranking as the top mainstream brand in the closely watched JD Power 2026 U.S. Initial Quality Study (IQS) — an achievement 16 years in the making.

The company surpassed the industry’s traditional mass market leaders in IQS, climbing from No. 15 in 2023 to No. 1 among mainstream brands in the annual survey of new buyers.

“This is a proud day for everyone at Ford, and the result of years of intensive work across our company,” said Jim Farley, Ford president and CEO. “Many doubted that an American company with a huge American workforce could compete with the world’s best on quality, let alone reach the top. But we put our heads down and worked together every day to deliver for our customers. Today, Ford is not only the most American automaker but also the gold standard for new vehicle quality.”

Thomas King, president of OEM solutions at JD Power, said Ford not only ranked “highest among mass market brands,” but also “the Ford F-150, Ford Mustang and Ford Super Duty ranked highest in their respective segments.”

It is the second year in a row that those three iconic vehicles won their segments.

The Ford Escape, Ford Explorer, Ford Expedition and Ford Maverick also landed among the top three in their segments. That means seven of Ford’s 10 models tested placed in the top three in their segments, the highest percentage of any other automaker.

Ford improved in nearly every vehicle category measured by JD Power. Driven by software improvements, infotainment quality saw the largest leap forward, performing 11 points better than the industry average, while powertrain reliability also improved significantly.

Reaching best-in-class quality levels is the culmination of an intensive multi-year effort. Here’s how Ford methodically moved from quality also-ran to leader.

Closer Collaboration

Understanding the significance of this milestone requires a look back to the start of the decade. The disruptions of the pandemic and a rapidly shifting work culture changed how the industry designed and built vehicles.

As teams adapted to remote work and factory floors adjusted to new protocols, the need for fully integrated collaboration became paramount. With vehicles simultaneously evolving into complex, software-driven machines, Ford recognized traditional processes needed to change.

So the company acted. In 2023, it created a unified industrial system. This meant Vehicle Engineering, Manufacturing, Supply Chain and Quality teams worked side by side under one organization, led by Chief Operating Officer Kumar Galhotra.

The next step came this year when that industrial system evolved into Ford’s new end-to-end Product Creation and Industrialization organization, uniting the company’s digital, design and global industrial teams.

“Bringing them together allows us to look at the entire ecosystem of a vehicle – from the intricacies of software development to the deepest tier of the supply chain to the plant floor — as one continuous, collaborative flow,” Galhotra said. “We rallied the whole company around a clear vision: Quality Comes First. That means hard-wiring rigorous processes deep into the way we work, building a culture of relentless problem-solving and recognizing our teams when they prevent issues from reaching customers.”

Building Strong Engineering Safety Nets

Reaching best-in-class quality required a significant talent refresh. Over the past few years, Ford replaced about two-thirds of the senior leaders in its industrial system across engineering, supply chain and manufacturing.

In Vehicle Engineering, leaders saw an opportunity to bring deep, specialized expertise into the design phase early. Ford hired roughly 300 veteran engineers who carry the hard-earned wisdom of decades of design.

Free from daily production schedules, these engineers now act as internal auditors, running mandatory weekly design reviews to hunt for and eliminate potential failure points before blueprints ever reach the factory floor.

Integrating and De-Risking the Supply Chain

This upfront engineering rigor was paired with a cultural shift in how Ford manages its supplier network. At first, it meant “go see, find it, fix it” missions. Ford teams went directly onto supplier plant floors to address risks alongside their counterparts.

“It’s easy to celebrate heroes fixing problems,” said Liz Door, Ford chief supply chain officer. “What we really want is to celebrate zero defects.”

Now, Ford integrates suppliers earlier in the development process for rigorous design validation that helps ensure long-term performance — an effort that drove a 30% reduction in launch issues year over year.

Empowering Operators on the Plant Floor

In Manufacturing, the focus turned to benchmarking the best in the world and building strategic action plans to close the gap. Progress data is standardized and shared throughout each plant so teams can see how vehicle quality is trending.

Often, improvement ideas come from the people closest to the work.

“Leaders spend so much more time on the plant floor now. It’s about supporting and collaborating with our operators and learning from them,” said Bryce Currie, Ford chief manufacturing officer. “We’re averaging over eight ideas per project from operators, and we are investing to support them, like adding AI vision systems to help identify anomalies.”

Currie challenges each plant to be so clean he can eat off the floor, because every employee deserves to work in a clean environment — and when the standard is high, you can immediately see when something is out of place. When a plant finally meets his standards, Currie will do just that, usually choosing chocolate chip cookies or pretzels.

Closing the Software Gap

Finally, with vehicles becoming highly digital, Ford overhauled its software quality assurance from the ground up to make modern technology as reliable as the physical hardware. Today, before code ever reaches a vehicle, it is stress-tested through hundreds of thousands of automated scenarios designed to simulate unpredictable, real-world use. The result: Ford catches and eliminates software bugs far earlier in development, for a more seamless customer experience.

Perfecting the Present, Eyeing the Future

While these milestones show that Ford is on the right track, the company remains focused on the road ahead.

“Are we proud? You bet. Satisfied? Not even close,” Galhotra said. “This is a milestone, not a finish line. We will celebrate this moment today, but tomorrow we are back at it: chasing perfection, driving continuous improvement and getting better every single day.”

also

Ford's Senior Engineers & AI Tools Drive Quality Turnaround to Top JD Power's 2026 Rankings

At a Glance

• Ford deployed 350 senior engineers as expert troubleshooters to improve vehicle quality rankings.
• AI tools augment human expertise by analyzing massive data sets to catch manufacturing anomalies.
• Red teams of specialists challenge younger engineers on design choices before production begins.

Ford is pointing to its decision to deploy 350 senior engineers as expert troubleshooters and advisors to explain the company’s recent success as the top mass-market brand in JD Power’s 2026 Initial Quality Study.

It is possible to quibble about what the IQS is measuring, but it is a fact that Ford climbed out of the basement to the top of the list in the span of only a few years, and the company attributes that improvement to these so-called “gray beard” engineers.

The issue, according to Ford’s vice president of engineering Charles Poon, was “a collection of, I think, issues that stem from, I would say, inconsistent discipline in problem solving.” And problem-solving is the skill where these experts, some of whom had retired, excel. “There was an impact of an outflow of experience probably three or four years ago,” he said.

While it has been widely reported that Ford is backpedaling on an overreliance on artificial intelligence tools, in fact, the quality concerns predated Ford’s AI use, and the company has used AI tools as part of the quality turnaround, Poon said.

Some of those tools include the iPhone-based assembly inspection system that Design News saw during a tour of Ford’s Kentucky Truck Plant. That system checks wiring connectors and the installation of critical bolts.

“This tool with an iPhone, and there are several like this, where if an engineer or a technician they find like a bolt on the ground at a plant,” explained Poon. “They can snap a picture of it. It will look at the entire catalog of all of the parts that are on that vehicle. It will identify where that bolt should go.”

Such tools are supplemental to the engineers, he continued. “The idea is that there are many tools like that that augment the engineers. They don't necessarily replace them.”

The experienced engineers are working on product design as well as manufacturing, Poon reported. “Think of them as like a red team, okay?” he said. "The red team is individuals who look at the engineers' designs. They work with them in a way to find where the weak points are.”

Their purpose is to apply their own human intelligence, based on decades of experience, to parts that are being designed. “They say, ‘How might this part basically fail?’ And that was like an extra layering that we adopted over the course of the last three years.”

But even these experts now have AI tools to aid them in their work. “With the emergence of really powerful AI tools, we started to layer, on top of that, more advanced methods,” he said. “Methods in which even technical specialists could find it hard to synthesize the large volumes of data. And it wasn't just in the design phase, it was in the design phase, it was in the manufacturing phase, and it was in the service phase as well.”

These AI-augmented red teams represent a sea change in Ford’s outlook, Poon asserts. “This mindset of changing our culture, this is a really important point. The point here is that today we celebrate finding failures, and our tools allow us to find and celebrate catching anomalies earlier. Before, we would think that that is weakness, when we found failures in our design. Now this is something that's like, ‘This is great.’”

These technical specialists hold senior leadership positions, so they have the authority to get things done at the company. “Their sole mission is to help the younger engineers analyze their designs,” Poon said.

The specialists grill current engineers like they are Shark Tank contestants. “They will analyze the material selection with the engineer,” he said. “They will question why you have a radius of 2 millimeters here versus 2.5 millimeters here? How did you go about choosing it?”

As with Shark Tank, it may in fact be a team of judges, rather than a single technical specialist, evaluating a component’s design. In fuel systems, for example, Ford deploys red teams of five or six specialists to look at the designs, Poon said.

“These are individuals that know deeply about fuel tanks and how fuel is stored, how the vapor of fuel reacts to various types of materials that are in the fuel system, the fuel injectors themselves, the fuel pumps, and then also the software and control strategy,” he said.

“When we have a new fuel system for a new vehicle that's designed, the design engineers, now, typically several in a small team of two or three, will present their design. It's the job of the technical specialist to help, I wouldn't say poke and prod, but more to peer through the analysis to ensure that the due diligence is completed.”

Speaking of peering through analysis, that’s where Ford also applies AI tools to assist engineers. The volume of data coming from transmission tests can be too great for a human to reliably discern problems, but finding outliers is something AI does well.

“Those AI tools have been extended to what we have called advanced machine learning,” said Poon. “We run every transmission through a functional test. We create time-based curves of pressure, of force responses, of speed, and torque output. And over the course of a day, hundreds of thousands of traces are collected. And then we've applied machine learning alongside the engineering teams to analyze that data and to look for slight anomalies, things that like just kind of poke out from the water line and say, ‘Hey, you may want to look at this particular part.’”

When a problem is identified from testing, both engines and transmissions, then the problematic component gets disassembled for inspection. “In many cases, we found maybe a piece of contamination that shouldn't have been there that blocked a hydraulic passage that created a slightly higher pressure that would not have been noticed by a person just analyzing hundreds and hundreds of thousands of traces each and every day,” Poon explained.

Many of these AI tools have been developed by Ford in-house, so it is not a matter of writing custom prompts for ChatGPT. “We have many tools that we use,” noted Poon. “We have both in-house artificial intelligence tools that we've developed, especially advanced neural network machine learning algorithms that like pattern recognition and predictability.”

“We've also developed generative AI tools that are able to help augment the engineer to create geometries and optimization. And then we also have Agentic AI that helps us to do the peer reviews and support.”

So, while Ford has deployed red teams of experienced engineers to improve product quality through both design and manufacturing, the company is also benefiting from AI tools that assist engineers at all levels. “I would say we use both externally commercially available tools,” Poon remarked. “But we have developed our own internal. capability as well, because many of those specific applications requires very kind of bespoke training and development of those tools that are unique and we believe give us an advantage.’