Back in the 1980s, Ford’s ad campaigns ran on the idea that quality was “Job One.” If there was ever a time for truth in advertising, it’d be now, when Ford’s pervasive manufacturing issues keep costing it billions of dollars every year. On today’s morning news roundup, we lead with just how Ford is trying to get it together on the quality front.
Also on today’s docket, we have Mary Barra’s big payday; some tough news for General Motors on the chip shortage front; and more on Elon Musk’s price-cut strategy at Tesla, which may depend on being able to deliver one of his biggest and most ambitious promises. There’s a lot going on—no Bare Minimum Mondays in The Autopian’s Blog Mines—so let’s get into it. [Editor’s Note: What the hell? Bare Minimum Mondays are a thing? That’s it, I’m going to be keeping a close eye on our Monday numbers. A close eye! -DT].
Ford Tries To Raise The Bar, Starting With The New Super Duty
It’s a tough time for Ford Motor. In addition to undertaking the same electrified and digital transformation as almost every other automaker, it’s having to address quality and reliability issues at the same time—two major undertakings, but the first one cannot happen without the second.
After all, Ford had to post a $2.2 billion loss for 2022 and a good chunk of that can be attributed to $4.17 billion on warranty claims that year alone. (Yes, that’s a lot.) Basically every new Ford vehicle launch in recent years has seen quality issues, costly recalls and upset customers. That’s not what you want when you’re try to roll out a ton of new products, chase Tesla on the EV front and convince buyers and investors alike that you have what it takes to survive long-term.
CEO Jim Farley is one of the sharper guys in the business right now, so you know he knows his ass is on the line to fix this. How could it not be? So today we have a good deep-dive from Reuters into what’s being done to fix these quality issues, starting with the new Super Duty truck line at its Louisville, Kentucky plant.
There’s no single magic bullet here, but a lot of different, detail-focused initiatives. Those include adding quality inspectors, using more cameras for detailed inspections, driving a higher percentage of vehicles to check for defects and even halting the line to catch problems if necessary—a last-ditch move that can cost millions of dollars. But it’s being done here if that’s what it takes:
As part of a new approach to stamping out quality demons, Kentucky Truck Plant manager Joseph Closurdo said he stopped production for as long as three days earlier this year. The halts gave engineers and suppliers time to fix defective parts discovered as workers began building a new generation of Ford’s highly profitable heavy-duty pickups.
“We would shut the build down if we weren’t meeting one of the targets” for quality, Closurdo said on the plant floor last week.
Halting the assembly line rather than building trucks and fixing them later was just one element of a new approach to attacking quality problems that Ford is road-testing with the launch of the redesigned Super Duty trucks.
[…] Instead of test-driving a small sample of trucks to check for squeaks, rattles or infotainment system glitches – problems that take down scores on external quality surveys – Kentucky Truck deployed workers to drive 28,000 of the first new-generation Super Duties along a 25-mile (40 km) route near the factory.
“If it’s got a button, touch it. Make sure it works,” said David Jones, a member of the test-driving team and a 34-year Ford veteran whose father also worked at Kentucky Truck.
The story says that Kentucky Truck’s two lines are now running at close to full speed, cranking out an array of trucks and SUVs about once per minute. And the quality lessons learned here will soon be rolled out to other plans like the one making the new 2024 Mustang.
With any luck, these improved tactics will cut down on Ford’s recall headaches. It literally cannot afford to keep getting this wrong.
Mary Barra Takes Home The Big Three Payday Crown Again
Speaking of American auto industry CEOs, GM’s Mary Barra kept her title as the highest-paid chief executive in 2022, although it was down a few hundred grand from the previous year. (I hate it when that happens.) This detail comes to us from Securities and Exchange Commission filings reported by The Detroit News.
Here’s how much money car company CEOs make, if you’re curious:
Barra, 61, received pay last year of $28.97 million, down slightly from her 2021 compensation of $29.1 million. Even with the decrease, her 2022 compensation was more than both of her crosstown rival CEOs.
In late March, Ford Motor Co. reported that CEO Jim Farley, 60, made nearly $21 million in total compensation in 2022 — down 8% from 2021. Carlos Tavares, 64, CEO of Stellantis NV, maker of Jeep SUVs, Ram pickup trucks and other vehicles, received $24.8 million in 2022, a 22% increase from 2021.
[…] Pay for other GM executives in 2022 included:
Paul A. Jacobson, executive vice president and chief financial officer, $10.2 million in 2022, up from $9.57 million in 2021
Mark L. Reuss, president: $14.3 million, up from $12.5 million in 2021
Douglas L. Parks, executive vice president, global product development, purchasing and supply chain: $8.77 million, down slightly from $8.83 million in 2021
Stephen K. Carlisle, executive vice president and president, North America: $8.79 million, down slightly from $8.98 million in 2021
Barra’s had quite a run from the ignition switch scandal to the rapid electrification effort GM’s now undertaking, and I think she’s one of the best CEOs that automaker has had (independent of the fact that the bar for that is extremely low.)
But GM Is Struggling With Chips
But GM’s big electric push can be summarized in two words: “It’s coming.” The Cadillac Lyriq EV is barely anywhere right now production-wise [Editor’s Note: I saw out of my BMW i3’s window Jamie Lee Curtis driving hers in LA just the other day. -DT], the GMC Hummer EV is experiencing serious quality problems (and it’s patently ridiculous), the Chevy Bolt just entered hospice care and the Equinox and Silverado EVs are all still forthcoming. I think this rollout is due to be slower than GM’s been hyping it up to be.
And let’s put aside EVs and just talk normal cars for a second, too. According to a new study reported on by Automotive News, GM’s plants rank among the very worst hit by semiconductor shortages. This all bodes poorly for sales, profits and costs to the consumer:
The 11 GM plants — seven in the U.S., three in Mexico and one in Canada — have cut 327,148 vehicles in total from their production plans in 2023, according to AutoForecast Solutions, which has tracked the disruption of the chip shortage since it began in 2020. That figure accounts for about 58 percent of all chip-related North American production losses in 2023, and about 29 percent of the global total.
Emphasis mine up there, because holy shit. You don’t hear much any more about the chip shortage—I think it’s the kind of pandemic-related news we all know about and almost ignore now—but it’s still very much a thing. And GM’s feeling some of the worst of it.
Tesla’s Price Cuts Hinge On Autonomy And Subscriptions
Finally, here’s the Wall Street Journal’s Tim Higgins on the larger strategy behind these crazy rapid-fire Tesla price cuts we’ve seen all year. It’s not just about gobbling up market share—not entirely, anyway.
Musk’s plan apparently relies on a much-discussed and so far much-loathed possible key to future auto industry revenues: subscriptions. Basically, the plan is to get as many Teslas into people’s hands as they can right now, so they can charge them later on for subscriptions to the so-called Full Self-Driving tech:
Some fear Mr. Musk is picking a page from the industry’s dusty old playbooks by chasing a crown of global sales leadership, potentially at the expense of profit margins.
Mr. Musk maintains he is making a 21st-century gamble that he can, over time, profit from future software subscription-style revenue from Tesla owners, including for autonomous-driving capabilities.
“We do believe we’re…laying the groundwork here and that it’s better to ship a large number of cars at a lower margin and subsequently harvest that margin in the future as we perfect autonomy,” Mr. Musk said last week.
His argument is akin to Apple Inc.’s with iPhones and App Store sales: The bigger the fleet of Tesla vehicles sold today, the more potential for higher-margin software profits in the future.
The plan’s not unprecedented. Hyundai is hoping subscriptions will make up some 30% of future profits. But Tesla’s really the only major automaker still making big, bold, “just around the corner” promises when it comes to autonomy.
Full Level 4 self-driving, depending on who you ask, is somewhere between five years and a century out. The people saying “five years” are typically those who were saying the same thing 10 years ago, and there are fewer of those voices now that Argo AI and other firms have gone kaput.
But Musk remains extremely bullish on autonomy. In many ways, it’s the boldest claim he’s ever made, and for him that’s saying a lot. He’s the one who once promised drivers five figures’ worth of annual passive income from Tesla robo-taxis and made the claim that Tesla would be effectively worthless if it can’t solve self-driving. Clearly, he isn’t giving up on that if “perfecting” Full Self-Driving is the reason behind these price cuts, which have dug into the profit margins Tesla investors love so much.
Well, I’ve used Full Self-Driving (note: Tesla’s cars are not “self-driving” and in fact no cars on sale today are) and it’s like teaching a terrified 15-year-old to drive after they’ve been secretly raiding mom and dad’s liquor cabinet all afternoon [Ed note: This is hyperbole, of course — I feel I need to clarify this given the passionate nature of Tesla stans. -DT]. If this is the plan, Musk and company have a long way to go.
Your Turn
What’s the worst quality issue you’ve experienced on a new car? I’ve been fairly lucky on that front, although I owned an R56 Mini Cooper for several years and I can tell you that some stereotypes are true for a reason.
Worst quality issue was a 95 T-bird. Ate rotors and breaks for breakfast. After numerous replacements, Ford stated it was design flaw and refused to fix under Warranty.
Forced them to fix it, then traded it on the z28.
Ah the brake rotors on the tenth gen, the ones on the 89 we had warped at the slightest hint of hard braking. Nice to see they didn’t fix them in six production years.
The fact Ford tried to deny warranty claims as a “design flaw’ is particularly rich. Isn’t that kind of the point of a warranty?
“How Ford Is Attacking Its Quality Problems”
I love how that headline could have been run in any automotive or business publication at any point in the past 50 years, and still be relevant.
See also something regarding the “rebirth” of Cadillac
20something milliion for auto ceo’s is really not that extravagant. They actually lead companies that are complex orgs with disparate groups looking at everything you decide. if you want to find real “overpaid corporate douchebags” look into the finance sector.
it was not long ago that GM was reportedly shutting down plants to avoid having dealer stock. I assume to artificially increase demand, so the supply can be sold for at or in most cases above sticker, and only the highest profit models can then be made. https://www.autonews.com/manufacturing/gm-aims-avoid-pickup-truck-stockpile I get it, who doesn’t want to make more money from less, but the public should not be made to think this is still chip related….and Barra’s salary being so unacceptably high should definitely be focused on if after 4 years of chip pandemic issues she has failed to lead her company out of that hole.
I own a 2015 Fit. VIN under 5000, new generation, new plant. Nonetheless it’s been great.
Honda upgraded the bumper when it performed badly on the front overlap test. There were two recalls, neither of which affected my car. Honda stepped up for all of these.
I did lose an AC compressor, but it waited to die two days after our 6000 mile trip, and likely had to do with driving through a swarm of locusts that we had no way to avoid.
So I’m very happy.
I’ve soured a little bit on Honda. Re– 2017 Pilot EX AWD. AC compressor chewed itself up on month after 3 years. Honda goodwill repaired, lest I would have needed to find $3100 to fix it. Now it has been at the dealer since mid Dec needing a Smart Control Power Module. When the part ever comes in (lots of failures and nation wide backordered), that’s $1400. Not confident the transmission will last in the long run. It cooked the fluid in 20K miles and now I do 10K drain and fills to hopefully keep it working.
The local dealer has been coming through with loaners since Mid Jan, but still.
Sorry to hear that, and I’ve heard of other new Honda owners having issues. Mine is almost 9, and I think the Japanese minders were overseeing production since it was so early. Still, I did lose a compressor in year 7.
I still wouldn’t trade it for the world, and there’s nothing I want for thousands more than it cost.
So what exactly is the motivation for a CEO to do anything? They all have more money than they can spend, so is it pure ego? Nothing bad will happen to Jim Farley if Ford shits the bed. Other than some embarassment, he’ll still be rich and will probably get paid millions in a golden parachute to make room for the next person.
If I fuck up and get fired, I die in pain and my family starves.
For people in his position it’s not even about the money anymore. He can afford whatever the hell he wants forever and the next several generations of his family will live a life of extreme luxury. For the type of lizard people that find their way to being in 1% it’s about running the score up as much as they can.
It doesn’t matter that he’s incomprehensibly wealthy. What matters is his ego and knowing he has more than an amount of people that continues to increase. These people aren’t like you or I or frankly anyone on this site. Hell if you gave wife and I 5-10 million or so in cash you’d literally never hear from us again. We’d just be alternating between being in the mountains, being on the water, and traveling for the rest of our lives.
Counterpoint: Jim Farley is pretty far from “incomprehensibly wealthy.” Dude would get laughed out of a Gulfstream sales office if he told them it was a personal purchase.
He’s paid mostly in stock and worth ~30-40 million. If his gravy train cuts off today he can’t set up his current family to live a life of total luxury, let alone several more generations.
This is true, but IMO a CEO can only do so much. It’s the lowest level worker that will decide the quality of the vehicles. The people who put hands on. Just as it’s the cook making your burger deciding if they give a sh*t that day or not.
Uh, no, it’s not the people on the factory floor. It starts at the top with a focus on beans vs engineering. It travels down through the engineering departments and supply chain who each can totally screw up the product. By the time someone is snapping in the door panels the quality is already decided.
There is one thing I would (but will never happen) like to see happen. CEOs are not paid until AFTER their big plans succeed or fail. If the lowest person on the payroll fails, it is noticed immediately, at every successive layer of management, their fails are not noticed for a bit longer time. The CEO has a 5 year plan, don’t pay them for -plannng-, pay them for succeeding. If their plan fails, they get minimum wage for their time. No bitterness here, just a victim of the failure of Fiorina and the demise of HP.
Stock options are a big part of CEO compensation for exactly this reason. Mary Barra is not taking home $30 million on her W2.
…and the stock options are literally better for them because they can’t be taxed like liquid income can. This isn’t the “gotcha!” that the “defend the wealthy at all costs” crowd thinks it.
It’s not intended as a “gotcha”, it’s a simple statement of fact.
CEOs of large companies have a lot of delayed compensation, which in large part depends on how well the company performs over that time. The previous poster opined that CEOs should be paid based on future performance; and for the most part they are already.
The rate of taxation on that compensation can certainly be debated, and the fact that it’s lower than income can be a win, but its also the case that options can expire worthless if the stock underperforms.
Reading back at these comments I’ve realized that I’ve been a little sassier than I meant to in this thread. At the end of the day I genuinely don’t dislike anyone on this site…I just think it’s important that we all realize we have much more in common with each other than we do with these 1% ghouls and that we should be focused on helping each other rather than protecting their interests.
+1, though I will say the primary reason Barra and Farley are ghouls to me is not their compensation but their inexplicable failure to increase Z06 production rates or sell a V8 Bronco, respectively 🙂
Those are extremely valid complaints
So, I don’t like that CEOs get paid so much money, but here are some thoughts as to why they are paid so much.
So supposedly, if you give someone a “living” wage, then that person will try to do a good job for the satisfaction of doing a good job. There is supposed to be some research to back this up, but I never looked it up and don’t have citations for you. It would be nice if the powers that be applied this concept to all jobs. It’s also ridiculous what a “living” wage for a CEO is.
Running a big company is hard, there are so many decisions to make, and so much information you need to process to make the “right” decision if you want to actually do a good job. Personally, I don’t know if I could do such a job. Also, I don’t know if I would do such a job unless I was paid millions of dollars a year. Of course there are scam CEOs phoning it in and raking in the money.
My rebuttal to that is that a modern CEO may have a hard job, but it’s not any harder than it was in 1960 to run a gigantic global enterprise. And it’s sure as shit not any harder to run GM than to run a war, and last I checked the salary for a US military general was maybe 100K. Furthermore the CEO exists as the leader of a team, it’s not like they are a lonely dictator shouldering the burden of every single decision made in a company. If anything their job would be made easy if they install the right people in the management team. I just can’t get on board with “It’s a hard job, they neeeeeeed a bajillion dollars or nobody would do it!”.
I hate the idea of subscriptions for car options, but a subscription for autonomous driving seems reasonable. The system and routes will need to be continuously updated to make sure the vehicle operates safely. I could see this being a reasonable revenue stream for Tesla, when/if they develop a system that works well. A subscription makes more sense than charging buyers for an autonomous driving feature that may or may not be available during the service life of the car.
the issue is they will charge you for the hardware and software space to enable all of this to function even if you never use it. I would rather not pay for any of it.
Definitely still supply issues out there. Toyota (and I’m sure others) are still selling several models with only one smart key on delivery. Feature deletions b/c of chips are one that hasn’t been heard about much in a while, but at Honda, they recently moved blind-spot monitoring as an “available” feature on multiple models/trims that had it standard previously, even loaded Accord Tourings. Look at a Honda dealer’s online inventory and there will likely be trims with “w/o BSI” in the name for the affected models.
If Ford Truck stopped focusing so intently on chrome-plated plastic, maybe they could spare some attention for torquing nuts to spec.
It gets so wrinkly after a few years I dubbed it Scrotal Chrome.
Ford has these problems forever. They always chase the soft styling and ignore the hard engineering.
Without real data through time and across companies, who the eff knows what “quality” looks like. We were a Ford family in the 80s and 90s. They were POS’s compared to my experience later with Toyota, MB, BMW, Porsche, and heck even Audi. No internet back then. And no serious reporting of statistics other than what CR had available that I could find. Maybe Edmunds.
Anecdotal experience can seriously warp perspective too. I had minor annoying issues with Audi’s, but could buy cheaper parts sharing numbers at VW dealers and do the work myself. Everyone I recommended Audis to had horrible experiences. Neighbor had an F150 that apparently only needed oil every 3k miles to run to 400k miles. My Bronco rusted its roof rails, ate all its suspension bushings, ate several starter solenoids, got the accelerator cable stuck at WOT on the highway, etc. all in the first 10k miles.
I like the car for what it is but in terms of build quality, my 19 Fiesta is by far the worst car I’ve ever owned. Ignoring things like interior material quality (I know it was Ford’s cheapest car, the interior plastics are still borderline unacceptably bad) my car occasionally runs rough or even sometimes stalls immediately after filling it up with gas, constantly has some sort of slow air leak from the tires since Ford can’t make a wheel that seals properly, and recently the side skirt has started falling off and when I looked at it, it was clear the clip was broken from day 1 but just let go now. I bought that car brand new off the lot so I know that no one else had a chance to ruin it first.
Interestingly enough, my 2018 Fiesta ST has been perfect for 5 years and 33,000 miles. I’ve done nothing more than maintenance and replacing the brakes and tires I’ve hooned off of it. The interior is holding up fine, no squeaks or rattles, nothing falling apart.
However, I realize my personal experience is just one instance and I probably got lucky. I rely far more on the statistics and large quantity of anecdotal data that says Ford does indeed have a quality problem. All you have to do is look at the transmission problems on the Focus and Fiesta during the last decade for a clear example of that.
S13, not to be argumentative but I’ll ask the following questions regarding your experience:
1) Car running rough – is it at all possible you’ve gotten some bad gasoline along the way? If so, replacing the fuel filter and/or using some additives to get any water out of the gas tank might help.
2) Slow leak from the wheels – is it certain that it’s bad wheels from Ford or is it possible that some potholes along the way have damaged them?
3) Failure to inspect clips at the factory certainly can be a quality problem, but is that really such a difficult problem to rectify? With any luck it’s 5 to 10 dollars in parts and 15 minutes to take care of. It might well be more time and hassle researching and purchasing the parts than doing the job itself.
I have a 14 Fiesta ST with 97k miles and it has been 100% reliable. CEL has never come on once and it’s never failed to start (still on original factory battery), but certainly not without it’s quirks.
I have the same rough idle issue that S13 has when I fully top up the gas tank after running the car until the gas light comes on. Goes away within a few miles and is just a minor annoyance on a manual transmission when I can easily blip the throttle at stop lights.
“If it’s got a button, touch it. Make sure it works,”
Just replace everything with a touchscreen. Voila! No buttons, no problems!
/s
[Editor’s Note: I saw out of my BMW i3’s window Jamie Lee Curtis driving hers in LA just the other day. -DT]
This must be the least DT sentence ever typed. He truly has ‘gone Hollywood’.
It’s no joke. He has.
I’m just shocked that he even knew who Jamie Lee Curtis was!
Well she’s been acting for over 40 years and just won an Oscar. Michael York would probably be a bigger lift.
DT has admitted that he lacks most American culture references due to him having been raised in Germany.
This is the code phrase to let everyone know he’s been kidnapped.
That ain’t shit. I saw Alice Cooper fart in a 1974 Pinto wagon at the Jack in the Box drive thru in 1978. No shit.
Quit name dropping kid. And stop calling yourself Loretta.
Having the CVT in my wife’s 2018 Forester begin to fail at 20k was alarming. Subaru has increased the warranty period on these CVTs to 100k, and they admittedly gave us absolutely zero crap about replacing it as soon as possible. But if we have any more issues with the CVT we’ll be forced to move on from Subaru as this transmission is in damn near everything they sell.
I had a 2017 Outback with three CVT failures before 50k miles. When you get a good CVT, they go 200k+ miles. When you get a bad one, they start to go pretty quick.
This is what I’ve heard, so hopefully this one is the good one we’re looking for.
unfortunately this type of trans is more and more common in the various mom wagons you can purchase. Subaru has had more time to get it right, and it sounds like they are far better than say Nissan at taking care of the situation, so I would probably keep it until 100K
Oh we’ll definitely be keeping it to 100k, it’s just a matter of wanting to keep it past that if we keep having issues.
Subaru is at the very least admitting the issue, extending warranties and promptly replacing any transmission with issues. Yes, this is far, far better than Nissan pooping out defective CVTs for a decade-plus without seeming to act on anything.
About two weeks ago.
Okay, thanks for that.
That Tesla behind me on FSD is also gaining rapidly. I feel like it should be braking about now, or do I have to wait for the next update?
At least that update can be done. Folks looking at their cell phones while driving? Darwin level update.
I don’t want to be the collateral damage in someone Tesla driver’s Darwin-level update, though.
Appears to be about as likely (or less) as getting nailed by a mechanical failure on a non “auto drive” car. You just don’t hear about the other failures because clicks.
Lack of attention is a *universal* problem that leads to crashes, though. Naming something “full self-driving” when it really can’t do that is misleading to consumers and encourages folks who haven’t read all the fine print saying “please pay attention” to look away. That’s a problem. That’s why it gets called out more than, like, bog standard driver oopsies and mechanical woe. It’s an overpromise that underdelivers in a particularly dangerous way.
Ford is attacking the issue the wrong way. From what I’ve seen with Sandy Munro is the engineering is not perfected.
A well engineered product has parts with proper tolerancing that eases assembly as much as possible. Assemblies are to be designed to be as fool-proof as possible. We must remember that the assembly line workers are not ASE certified mechanics (not saying they aren’t skilled, just a different skillset).
The quality of your parts is independent of the assembly, but quality escapes of the parts will bite you later.
There’s an old saying: “You can’t measure quality.”.
Good design and rigorous process control leads to the highest quality products.
I hope Ford is adding all these inspections as data collection to start root cause analysis. As presented, it looks like a bandage, not a cure.
Design it to be fool-proof, and someone will come out with a better fool…
My designs are now labeled “fool-resistant” instead.
My wife got her RAV4 hybrid brand new in 2020, honestly haven’t had any problems with it.
It’s a Toyota, of course you haven’t had any problems with it.
If only Toyota sold cars anymore
The Corolla, Camry, Crown, Prius, 86, and Supra aren’t enough for you???
Toyota probably makes more cars than anyone else in 2023.
from what I’ve read on reddit, most of those are hard to find!
They’re not. I’ve browsed listings for Crowns and there are a ton near me. I’ve also browsed Corolla listings trying to find GRCs before the car was programmed into the sites as a search option and there’s a huge supply of them. Really the only one you might struggle to find is a correctly equipped GR86 because dealerships are still slapping markups on the manuals ones and for god knows what reason the JDM fanboys are still paying them.
That being said, you can find manual BRZs at sticker pretty easily. Or if you’re willing to deal with the automatic they’ll sell you a GR86 at MSRP but buying the auto completely defeats the purpose of that car. I’m the opposite of the “no manual no dice” crowd but that is absolutely a car that you need to get in stick. It’s inherently impractical and focused on driving, so you should opt to have it be as sharp as it can be.
I haven’t looked too hard, but local supply for me is low. You can certainly find them though. Maybe the posts I am reading refer more to the CA market, as their supply seems to be less than USA’s.
That was supposed to be a joke about how there are no new Toyota’s for sale in my area and there haven’t been for seemingly a few years now….
intention: Cars = vehicles
Got it, inventory has been normal around here for a while so the joke was lost on me.
The irony with Ford is they were going down the right path with the “One Ford” initiative, and then they blew it all up. And now they wonder why they’re having profitability and quality problems. Less variations, less potential quality issues and more profit. Rip on Tesla quality all you want, but they’re pretty profitable.
I’m sure Mary Barra does 4-500 times as much work as the average factory employee, right? She must in order to be worth that salary, because I’ve been told we live in a meritocracy. At least if I’m an assembly line worker making 60k I’ll know that if I just do 482 times more work I too will be able to make a record breaking salary!
This country is embarrassing. Anyway my biggest new car issues were with my GTI. In the first 1000ish miles it misfired when I was passing on a two lane country road. It was pretty scary because it shut down two cylinders, I lost most of my power, and the car started violently shaking. I restarted it and it seemed fine but I called the dealership the next day.
I was then told that this was completely normal EA888 behavior and to not worry about it. Unsettling, but whatever. Well it happened several more times in the following months and put me in harm’s way on I95, at which point I’d had enough, pulled off, found the nearest VW dealership and told them to fix it.
I waited about 6 hours only to be told there was nothing wrong with the car, they’d put a cleaning solution in the gas tank, and to take it back to my local dealership. The dealership that sold it to me then told me it must have been because I was using sketchy gas (I wasn’t) and given a list of “VW approved gas stations” and told that they couldn’t help me if I didn’t use VW approved fuel.
It was then fine for about a year other than the cruise control only working some of the time and the fact that it incinerated all of its consumables at a shocking rate. Then it started having ignition issues and I finally said enough was enough and traded it in for my Kona N. I pulled up the VIN recently and the car is up into the teens for quantity of service visits in the first 15-20,000 miles. Can’t beat that VW quality…
Lol, VW approved gas stations. What an amazing tactic that is.
I literally laughed in the tech’s face. One of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever heard and I come from a German car family…so I’m used to hearing ridiculous things
Do you think that a welder with 20 years of experience should get the same pay as a welder with 20 days of experience because they both do the same amount of welding?
I think in this case a welder with 20 years experience DOESN’T do the same amount of welding – they do way more than the new one in the same amount of time. The experience means they’re going faster, making fewer mistakes, making cleaner welds.
I appreciate the spirit behind the comparison but it kinda undersells the value of experience.
Oh the new kid can lay as many inches of weld in an hour as the old hand can. The weld is just going to be much inferior. That was my point.
The amount of work you do doesn’t decide your pay, the quality of your work does. Which is why it’s wack to say that a CEO shouldn’t be paid more than an assembly line worker if they don’t do more work.
I had a mk V GLI with the EA 888. Mine went through an intake manifold every time we had a cold winter. The plastic would get brittle and break. It was always where the butterfly valves were. 3 manifolds in 4 years. Bloody German cars.
The insinuation that people should be paid solely on the amount of work they do is ridiculous. Experience and responsibility play a big part in how salaries are determined. For example, being responsible for making sure that a cheeseburger is assembled properly does not command the same level of responsibility as ensuring the long-term profitability of an entire fast-food restaurant chain.
That makes sense for the proles, but it doesn’t explain the absurd ratio to CEO income.
This is not to pick on you personally, but what salary would it take to entice you to be the CEO of GM or Ford?
Because people with the skill set and personality to do so can already make high 6 – low 7 figures leading a smaller company or filling a SVP role at a large one. And not have to live with your every move being picked apart by the automotive press, have responsibility for 100,000 employees, etc.
I would not take the CEO position for a million a year, and I don’t think I’m alone.
I get where you are coming from. I just don’t buy the idea that CEO should be singled out as a role deserving of .1% tier wealth. People (well, men) led multinational companies for decades without this level of compensation, it was only in the 1980s that we entered the absurd.
Here is the real shit regarding CEO compensation. Just compare CEO pay in the 1970-1985 period to the amount today. WTF? These people are not God. Some stuff is just not right, no matter how you try to justify it.
I’ve been pretty lucky with new car quality. My only one that had more than 1 minor issue was also my first new car. I had a 2000 Olds Alero with the 3.4L. It may have been karma for trading in a hail damaged LeSabre on a rainy night that also had some random problem where the engine would just cut out every couple of days and noone could seem to diagnose it. Sometimes it would restart, and sometimes it wouldn’t restart for up to 20 minutes. No codes or check engine lights either. I’m sure they didn’t spot all the hail damage that rainy night, and it probably didn’t cut out on them during the test drive.
The Alero had the alternator die the day after I brought it home. It continued to have stupid issues to the point where it was in the shop for 19 days in the first year. Not quite good enough to lemon law it of course. Brake rotors warped at like 13,000 miles (just out of warranty for wear parts). The lower intake manifold gasket went at about 39,000 miles (again, just out of the factory warranty, but I had an extended warranty that covered it.). I ended up selling it off because I just didn’t have any confidence in it anymore.
I’ve told the story before, but my brand new 2012 GT500 stalled and “ran out of gas” with 1/4 of its first tank remaining because of a bad fuel pump. Luckily it was within a few hundred feet of my driveway and not on a busy highway.
I know of quite a few people whose brand new Gen V Vipers ate their engines before the break in was even finished because of insufficient cleaning of debris during the casting process. Luckily mine didn’t seem to be affected, although FCA gave out 10 year powertrain warranties as a courtesy and I still have a couple years left on mine.
Worst quality issues on a new car? Do current model year rentals count? If so then it would be the Mustang convertible I rented in Houston last year. We had to grab the rear quarter windows and pull them up the rest of the way as just using the switches wouldn’t shut the windows all the way.
Exact same thing happened to me and my wife in Hawaii last year. Although, being Hawaii, it wasn’t really a problem.
When I returned it, the guy at the rental return said “Yeah, pretty much every Mustang convertible we have has that same problem.”
Same thing happened to me in Florida 2 months ago, also the car had something wrong in the driver side at the front, like a bent wheel or something like that, it was shaking a lot in the highway. I complained and they gave me $100 back.
I just experienced a relatively unique issue with a Ford actually. For the past 3 years the AGM batteries ford supplies in their vehicles has been problematic. the internal systems checks that draw power as a vehicle sits and waits for the next time it is used has seemingly increased enough that if you do not drive a vehicle for 2 weeks the chances it will start has become a toss up. they actually suggest a vehicle on a lot be disconnected from the battery if left for 3 weeks or more unattended. the Hybrid Maverick which has a large drive battery in theory should provide backup power tot he 12 V until both batteries are drained I would think, but apparently now. this unit was sitting, waiting for a recall to be completed since November, once it finally returned from the dealer, it sat on our lot for a week, but then it would not come on. using a jump pack we were able to engage the electric drive motor, but the Hybrid Gas motor would not come on. and of course now a check engine light. I have to wonder what happens to fleets of fully electric vehicles? Outside of lugging out another 12V battery, which you cannot access in the Lightning BTW when the battery in question is dead, how is this going to work for cold climates when a battery used to get the Golf Cart “started” is suddenly dead?
Not a Ford, but I feel like C/D had a similar battery drain issue on their long-term Sonata N-Line and the service department tried to say something about not letting a car sit for a week or more or something similarly silly when it comes to a new car. Wonder if it’s a similar supplier issue?
it could be, I am not sure who make the Ford Branded AGM batteries, but considering the big batteries in the lightning are from that Korean company based out of Georgia, perhaps that the connection?
Ford posted a $21 billion loss in 2022 due to endemic quality problems. Ford simultaneously paid $22 million to the guy who’s been saying he’ll fix endemic quality problems for years. Several of his underlings also received multi-million dollar raises, outpacing inflation.
Wooo late-stage capitalism!
Oh and let’s stop pretending that stopping a production line to address quality problems is some DEFCON 0 maneuver. It’s, like, page 2 of the Toyota manufacturing system and has been for half a century now. The fact that Ford is still OK with sending failing units down the line and fixing them later says everything you need to know about their operation.
“The fact that Ford is still OK with sending failing units down the line and fixing them later says everything you need to know about their operation.”
“Hold my beer”
– Tesla
They figured out this stuff as a system over 50 years ago, tried to teach the system to us 40 years ago, and here’s execs just randomly grabbing little half-understood bits from it now.
Working in IT, the best folks will just grab a For Dummies book when they’re new to something, while the worst are the ones who will loudly scoff and then go and invent a new, far worse way to do it.
An American (W Edwards Deming) taught it to Toyota before that.
and let’s not forget that Deming was involved with Ford since the 50’s. look up the “Ford-Mazda study” and you can see where SPC and TQM resulted in better product for the same transmission using the same specs and materials.
probably the best example I can recall was some of the stories about Mopar motors of the 60’s and 70’s. some of the engine builders were actual car guys and understood matched sets. others just took what was in the bit as long as they all were inside the tolerances. you really wanted the motors with as close as possible the same tolerances on weight and piston diameter compared to the actual bore. high end of the piston diameter in the block with low end of the tolerance bores and the things would lock up after a while, the opposite and they would drink oil. all the pistons weighing in at various ends of the tolerances and the things might as well be Waukesha junk motors.
One of the things I recall reading is that arguably GM held their tolerances on connecting rods and piston weights within the same specs as Honda. However the Honda engines always shook less. GM investigated to find out why.
Honda uses just-in-time delivery: the unexpected benefit that GM found was that all four connecting rods in any individual engine were manufactured in sequence on the same machine, and the same for the pistons. Used in packaged sets, this meant that the components were very close to being perfectly matched in weight and balance. They might all be heavy or light but they were all “identical”. This gives a naturally balanced, smooth running engine, but cost nothing more to manufacture as the component maker just had to maintain spec.
GM batch ordered and used connecting rods and pistons from various manufacturers. Of course each component was within spec, varied individually. They were not kept together in sets or sequence but just “dumped” them all together into big bins and grabbed at random as needed. This meant that you might get four connecting rods or pistons (all within spec) but all of which were different weights. This unbalancing created rougher running engines even if the design, manufacturing tolerances, and assembly quality were identical to Honda.
GM concluded it wasn’t worth changing to Honda’s grouping system.
I am still astounded that 1 Ford admitted that in 2021, Ford lost 900 million, and in 2022 they lost 2 billion in profit due to EV sales, and now have 3 Billion expected to be lost in 2023. perhaps if they stopped relying on the F150 with a gas motor to pay for EV stuff and let those vehicle truly stand on their own Model e Pillar, then the one that is really making the money can be invested in to avoid the massive quality issues currently in place.
I’d bet money this happened because the factory’s output was judged solely on number of units shipped and probably some cost reduction targets. Since pausing the factory to fix problems hurts both of those metrics, it didn’t happen. When you track a specific metric you get that specific metric and nothing else.