Ford began rolling out its new electrical architecture back in the 2021 model year, which introduced a few benefits – including over-the-air (OTA) update capability. Since then, the automaker has rolled out a number of OTA updates that contain everything from various improvements to new features to bug fixes – and, more recently, repairs for recall-related issues. As one might imagine, addressing recall fixes via OTA updates rather than physical dealer visits is a money saver for Ford, too.
“OTA costs 95 percent less than physical repairs,” Galhotra said during Ford’s Q2 2025 earnings call with investors. “Roughly, a third of our recalls over the past three years have been software-related, and we are addressing this head on. We are using over the air, or OTA updates, to reduce customer inconvenience of having to take the recall units in for service. OTAs are a game changer. OTAs cost over 95 percent less than physical repairs.”
This is certainly key for Ford, which has issued more recalls than any other automotive manufacturer over the past couple of years, and already broke the all-time record for a calendar year in the first half of 2025. This creates quite an inconvenience for customers, but as Galhotra previously noted, it also adds significant costs to Ford’s bottom line, too. In fact, warranty costs have hammered The Blue Oval’s profit for some time now.
Even though things are seemingly improving on that front, Galhotra also recently pointed out that cost improvements pertaining to field service actions – which include recalls and customer satisfaction programs – aren’t expected to go down anytime soon. Much of this pertains to the fact that Ford continues to face most of its quality issues from the 2020-2022 model years, while initial quality on newer models has thus far proven to be quite a lot better by comparison, meaning it’ll be a while before things truly get ironed out.
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Funny. 2020 IQ was 174. 2025 was 193…..so no, initial quality is 12% worse.
The only montra here is OTA recalls cost less…..duh. but when there is a 70% uptick in software and not hardware issues, pretty easy to know the root cause and what is not being addressed. You can’t fix a hardware issue with OTA other than delaying inevitable to get it out of warranty. Sad justification for a job and outsourcing/firing the brains.
Sad spin on facts, and continual perpetuation justifying executives who would starve in grocery store.
In other news, water is wet.
While I’m glad recalls catch problems, maybe Ford would save money if they just tightened quality control.
Quality control is putting them together right with quality parts. Recalls from software are a failure of development/testing and putting into production a system with a flaw that was found by customers and not in proper testing/vetting prior to producing them.