In the rush to automate, Ford appears to have rediscovered the value of experience the hard way. The automaker has had to rehire former engineers to diagnose and fix problems tied to the automated and software-driven systems it leaned on in their place, The Verge reported — a concrete example of automation running ahead of what it can reliably replace.
The brain drain behind the gap
The roots go back to Ford's pivot toward electric vehicles in the early 2020s, when it offered buyouts to thousands of experienced engineers and technicians, many of them specialists in gasoline powertrains. One was Lem Yeung, a 30-year Ford powertrain engineer who took a buyout in 2021 and returned as a consultant in 2025 to help tackle a surge in powertrain warranty claims, IEEE Spectrum reported.
"When the focus shifted away from engines, many skilled engineers and technicians left, leaving a gap in both numbers and expertise," Yeung told the magazine. He described how a single missed test or a wrongly set switch on the line "can bleed out" across a million build variables — and argued engineers need to "touch and feel stuff again" rather than trust automated tools alone. The underlying problem is that computer models represent an idealized design, not how parts actually behave on a real production line under real tolerances.
A record recall year
The consequences show up starkly in the data. Ford issued 152 safety recalls in 2025 — a single-year record for any automaker, according to CBT News — affecting roughly 13 million vehicles. A large share of its recent recalls involve software faults, many fixable remotely, but many still require dealership visits.
The regulatory toll has been heavy too. In late 2024, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration hit Ford with a $165 million civil penalty — the second-largest in the agency's history — under a consent order that found Ford was too slow to recall vehicles with defective rearview cameras and gave regulators incomplete information. The order installed an independent monitor over Ford's recall practices for at least three years.
The warranty bill
Quality failures carry a direct cost. Ford paid roughly $4.8 billion in warranty claims in 2023, up about 15% from the prior year, WardsAuto reported, and an $800 million spike in repair costs for older vehicles dented a 2024 quarter badly enough to force a cut to full-year guidance. Chief executive Jim Farley acknowledged that bending the warranty curve would "take time." Ford has said those costs eased in 2025, a sign newer model years are launching cleaner.
Automation's limits
Ford is not alone in finding that automation can miss what seasoned humans catch. Automated and AI-assisted tools optimize for the variables they are given; they can overlook interactions that only surface in physical production or that require judgment built over years. Ford's response has been to put human expertise back into the loop — hiring quality specialists, expanding software-validation testing, and, as The Verge reported, bringing back engineers it had eased out.
The episode is not an argument against automation in manufacturing, which remains essential to building cars at scale and cost. It is an argument for calibrating it — and for recognizing that in something as complex as a modern vehicle, some jobs still need the kind of judgment that only comes from having done them for decades. For Ford, the price of relearning that — a record recall year, a nine-figure federal penalty and billions in warranty charges — has been steep.
