Now the Lightning production hold is 5 weeks. Where Ford originally was quick to blame SK, they now have been quoted in the Freep with a “ no comment” on root cause. Insight anyone on what went wrong?
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Building cars is hard, building electric cars that don't catch fire is even harder
It's a cultural thing. Quality has to be reinforced and supported from top down. Management has to be willing to listen to employees who actually do the work and live with this stuff. Maybe if they stopped talking AT folks and have an actual dialogue things would change. I'm wouldn't hold my breath.
Another obvious thing, look across every function in the organization and take note of how few work on things that are directly connected to product delivery (design, testing, quality, manufacturing). Trackers galore to set up meetings, metrics, asking when you'll complete an assignment vs picking up a task and doing.
Quite frankly I’m pleased that they are trying to get it right, even if it is after the fact, to resolve the issue. We are well known for pushing things through too soon to meet unrealistic expectations and get screwed on execution. All because the people who do the actual work and know it isn’t ready are too afraid to tell the emperor that he isn’t wearing clothes. I got it. No one wants to pi-s off the people who can fire their a-s.
If people embraced realism, we wouldn’t have pi-s poor execution, horrible customer experiences and might have a decent quality product that people want.
@htw+1lsEEzqX same thing I've heard! I've even heard the CV LL3 that lives in the south is dangling by a thread.
I expect Douggie to fire almost all internal CV teams and to outsource all of that work. It's what he does.
Farley has been having his temper tantrums. LOL, the id--t knows he's exposed as a fake. Henry III is pi---d. Poor Alexandra is being pushed out of BoD. Lots of finger pointing happening. LL3/4s are freaking out, they know theyre getting cut as well. By june expect a few more thousand cuts.
Even simpler - Ford can’t do product launches any more, period. You could give them a decade and it still would be correct.
This is what happens when you have a bunch of executives leading a manufacturer of vehicles that come from others places that did not build vehicles, or in the case of the former or current CEO who thought they knew but did not - you get real sh---y results. What did Musk famously say when he was trying to scale up to build the Model 3: “ Building cars is hard “. Yes, it is, due to the complexity of regulations, the ever changing consumer market place, etc, etc. Its not like writing code or building a PC , a phone or a chair- way , way , way more involved.
But ole Secret CEO Billy Boy thought and thinks he knows best - we are going all electric, less parts , less cost, we don’t need any experienced people that know how to build vehicles. Such an a--hat as is the entire current leadership level.
All of the above is what went wrong, and why Ford is doomed if they don’t stop and recalibrate with some experience automotive or other engineers that build complex highly regulated items.
We rushed a vehicle that was 2-3 years away to market to beat Tesla Cybertruck, and didn't do the due diligence in testing and safety. The result, a truck no one wants at the price point it's selling for, that can spontaneously combust at any moment, or brick plugging it into a public charger.
When Tesla announced the Cybertruck in response to Mach-E, and then Ford said "Oh we have an F-150 EV ready to go!" People should have been suspicious.