USAJim Farley calls the 2023 F-Series Super Duty launch “a catalyst for change” at Ford. Since then the company has replaced about two thirds of the leaders across manufacturing, supply chain and engineering, the functions it groups together as its industrial system.
Thousands of trucks parked before delivery
Software and component problems on that launch left tens of thousands of nearly finished Super Duty trucks sitting in marshalling yards instead of going to dealers. Ford reworked them there, over faults that ranged from minor software bugs to substantial ones. Farley’s point is what would have happened before: “In the past, we would have released that and it would go to the dealers, and then we would have recalls.”
The leaders who went, by his account, were the ones content with good enough.
Ford’s new rule for a launch
The stated policy now is that a problem found before delivery stops the vehicle rather than the customer’s week. “We had to slow production down,” Farley says. “We had to delay vehicle launches. We had to take the pain at the company.” Both cost money and both push revenue into a later quarter, so the claim is checkable against Ford’s own launch calendar rather than its statements.
Some of it has already landed on a scoreboard. Ford finished first among mass-market brands in J.D. Power’s 2026 Initial Quality Study at 152 problems per 100 vehicles. That is 41 fewer than a year earlier, the largest year-on-year gain of any mainstream brand in the study. That result came with a caveat Farley made himself in July: Ford still runs more recall campaigns than any other automaker, and a first-place finish on 90-day quality does not settle that.
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