Ford has admitted to rehiring hundreds of human workers after its aggressive AI adoption strategy backfired.
The US automaker hired over 350 veteran engineers, referred to internally as “gray beards”, over the past three years in order to address mistakes made by automated systems.
The staff will lead quality reviews after the automation issues cost the company billions of dollars, Bloomberg reported, while some workers will also help improve and train the AI systems.
“We had been relying more and more on automated quality systems and not getting the desired results,” said Kumar Galhotra, Ford’s chief operating officer.
“We brought back technical specialists and they hunt for failure points before a part ever reaches the plant floor.”
Those who think AI is like steam engine of new industrial revolution are both right and wrong. What they forget is that steam engine invented back in ancient Greece, and it didn’t spark industrial revolution until victorian times.
Those who push AI now will flop badly, because we still lack both necessary ingredients and necessary conditions for next economic revolution.
Thousands who will NOT be rehired because of your oopsie - People with families with completely disrupted lives, you visionless, incompetent fucks.
Okay, but we’re here to talk about corporate profits
It didn’t backfire for upper level management, who bonused themselves already, now did it.
‘We didn’t pay as much attention as we should have to the experience of our most knowledgeable engineers,’ says automaker
No. You wanted to replace engineers who costs hundreds of thousands of dollars a year with a glorified chatbot because it cost less (for the introductory period only) and now you’re trying to save face because it blew up in your faces.
How do you know that the automation they’re talking about is LLMs?
Automation cost + automation issues cost + rehiring cost premium. That must be costly.
Yes. Pass it on to consumers.
Fine by me. Cars suck and I won’t buy one. Not that I could afford to even if I wanted
Does it really matter when the taxpayer is there to bail them out?
Ford never took the bailout they took low interest loans. Not to defend ford but they’re a better managed company than almost all other US car manufacturers. When even the smartest car manufacturer is making these costly mistakes it paints a pretty bleak picture
They don’t raise taxes anymore. That’s why everything is so expensive.
There is no justice in this. Mass layoffs with selective re-hiring was the plan all along. If AI wasn’t the excuse, “the economy” would be and it would look the same.
Disrupt the lives of hundreds or thousands of people, indiscriminately. Then bet on being able to get enough of them to come back on weaker terms, weaker contracts, and with reset seniority.
Ford hired AI
You don’t hire A.I. any more than you hire computers or equipment. They implemented AI, or used AI, or any other term referring to a thing and not a person.
All the US automakers are the same. They went through this in the mid 2000s too. Back then it was cutting engineering staff to save profits and outsourcing.
Until that decision showed in Part Quality and they got downgraded by JD power and other industry measures. Then management tried save it by putting together teams to rebuild skills and consumer confidence.
One big issue was interior plastic panels with visible/touchable sharp split lines with flash. Picture shitty army men miniatures.
My niece cut her calf open on a razor sharp flash edge of a dodge map pocket. That’s how bad it had gotten.
One visit I went to the GM tech center to consult on some better part options, the office had about 150 cubicals and there were like 3 people working there. Outsourcing killed a ton of legacy knowledge with the layoffs.
Side point: Do you have any idea how hard it is to get downgraded by JD power? It’s a marketing firm. You pay for the awards. A lot. Hundreds of thousands for them.
Their QA was that bad. Still is. Used to be too.
The important bits:
The staff will lead quality reviews after the automation issues cost the company billions of dollars - while some workers will also help improve and train the AI systems.
“We brought back technical specialists and they hunt for failure points before a part ever reaches the plant floor.”
After rehiring experienced engineers, Ford experienced a marked improvement in its quality standards.
“Over prior years, we didn’t pay as much attention as we should have to the experience of our most knowledgeable engineers that have been with us through many product cycles.
Basically saying that they massively underpaid and undervalued their staff, took and are still taking a hit that’s costing them BILLIONS and rehired the staff to train their ai so that they can do it again.
I hope the staff that were rehired asked and received a massive pay increase, inline with what it would be costing ford still, if they didn’t.
See, what I see is that Ford intends to keep using AI, they’re just temporarily using experienced humans to train the AI to be better at it’s job before getting rid of the humans again.
Billions? Fuck, they might need to get bailed out with taxpayers’ money!
Say what you will but Ford was the only one of the big three that didn’t take money directly. That isn’t to say they didn’t benefit from those programs however.
This move was still colossally stupid. They tried to save millions and costs themselves billions.
This is a myth the internet will not let die. Ford did not take the Obama bailout because they didn’t qualify, as they already took a huge bailout by Bush a year prior.
My link is to factcheck.org so if you have another link I’d be willing to read it.
Edit: I went searching for what you’re talking about around the 2007ish time period and I simply can’t find it. Everything is about TARP in 2008 which started with Bush and Ford didn’t take from. Ford did take a 5.9B loan from the Department of Energy in 2009. Looks like they did pay that loan back but have since taken another.
They didn’t qualify because they weren’t struggling as badly, the F150 is the best selling truck in the world and domestic sales of the mustang and focus were their buoys. Not qualifying is a good thing… they didn’t need to take the bailout so they weren’t offered to
Brought to you by the same people who forgot they are a car company and stopped making cars.
Ford made the model TT which was a truck (yes, just like the model T car) in 1924, that’s after selling an assemble yourself truck. The F series was introduced in 1948 and the F-150 is the most popular truck globally by a lot. They’re very literally the first to ever mass produce trucks… so idk what your comment is trying to say. Ford has made trucks as long as it’s made cars and is arguably one of the only vehicle manufacturers in the world that can claim to be a company that makes trucks as their original products over 100 years ago.
They did? What else is Ford making?
Trucks. The only car Ford makes any more is the Mustang.
Are you including SUVs and vans in “trucks”?
Yes, as the Federal Government does as well when it comes to emissions laws
Hired back for the short term, I hope they realize…
Could be, but given how genAI has trained on the whole of recorded human knowledge and still can’t accomplish basic addition in many cases, chances aren’t awful that these people will remain essential, given that Ford insists on adhering to this imprecise process.
Lots of bad headlines for Ford this year. This one comes after they admitted publicly that if Chinese cars were allowed in American markets they wouldn’t be able to compete. (Compete in this context really means: “Couldn’t price gouge”.)
Ford comes straight out of Nazi philosophy, Henry Ford was part of the American Nazi Party, and a huge part of that mentality is “don’t compete, destroy” the concept of doing better and earning that top spot is a foreign concept. It’s a brute force approach to manufacturing which is why they took this moronic AI route
Actually, it is in the total context. Battery tech, style, price, durability of Chinese electric vehicles blow away anything we have.
The chinese government is blowing huge wads of cash supercharging their strategic technologies. Without some coordinated approach over here, there is no way to compete with that.
Republicans have been whittling away at tech and basic science investments since the “contract
withon America”. This is what happenas as a result.China is spending a fraction of the $88 billion Detroit was given…to build expensive trucks 30 years out of date.
That’s interesting. Thank you.
Note that they are doing so recklessly and have dug themselves into several large holes they’d rather we not see.
In the area of renewable energy, they seem to be doing very well. They are wreaking environmental havoc all over the world to get the raw materials, though. Just check out some of their mines in Africa, for example.
Yeah. They’re just butt hurt because with actual competition they couldn’t charge 60k+ for an over engineered piece of shit that will strand you at any given time because of a software or hardware failure.
My inlaws just bought a new Ford, some SUV thing, haven’t had it a year, and there’s already a recall because of a software issue. The automated Avoidance system has a bug where it can be triggered at incorrect times. WHICH WILL CAUSE THE VEHICLE TO SUDDENLY SLAM THE BRAKES WITH NO WARNING OR HUMAN INTERACTION.
like what the actual fuck. That’s an issue that could absolutely cause a serious accident. Everyone who owns that model should be getting at least 10k in addition to the issue being fixed asap
100%
A better product means Ford has to actually produce better products, which cuts into the number of megayachts their CEO, board, and shareholders can squeeze out of their workers.
And the execs that made thr decision to fire in the first place will be punished by giving them bonuses.
TL;DR: Don’t buy a Ford.
Ford has always been a shitty company.
Remember the Focus? Number one selling vehicle for years with a fundamentally flawed transmission Ford just refused to fix. Now they are rarer than Ferraris.
