A call in January had Malcolm Gordon springing from his seat at work. His infant son was locked inside the family's Ford Mustang Mach-E after his wife had gone to charge the vehicle on her way to pick up their eldest from winter camp.

He drove the half-hour to where his 2021 Mach-E had become unresponsive and broke the window to unlock the vehicle and rescue his son after AAA's tools were unable to reach a latch to get the door open. The boy, thankfully, was unharmed. But the experience, said the 36-year-old nonprofit development director from Sherman Oaks, California, initially made the Mach-E go from the best vehicle he's ever owned to a "dealbreaker," he said: "It was very scary, honestly. I didn’t feel safe with my children inside."

The incident was just one that prompted a recall on the electric SUV — one of 90 recalls Ford Motor Co. has issued this year, already setting the record for the number of recalls any automaker has made in a full year.

Despite the number of recalls, the Dearborn, Michigan, automaker says the initial quality of the vehicles it produces today is among its best. The population of those recalls also shows year-over-year improvement. Ford executives say the company is making quality improvement a priority as warranty costs and recalls weigh on its financial results. They insist the company is making progress — though past quality mistakes will continue to cost it in the years to come, and it will take years to assess how the changes made today will affect quality results.

The number of recalls Ford has issued this year and the quality results Ford is seeing in its newest products are "incongruent," said Josh Halliburton, Ford's executive director of quality: "The reason they're incongruent is because the year you recall something is not the year you create the issue."

David Whiston, analyst at financial securities firm Morningstar Inc., noted that "all you can control is the vehicles you’re making today."

"Hopefully, the processes that they’ve added to be more diligent and more preventative in nature to try to catch stuff is working," Whiston said. "Hopefully, a few years from now, this period of high recalls will seem to be a part of the past. It costs real money."

Earlier this month, Ford issued a recall on 700,000 vehicles of certain 2020-24 Bronco Sport and Escape SUVs over fires resulting from a cracked fuel injector. The company disclosed in a regulatory filing that it expects to incur $570 million in costs to find a fix for the problem.

In June, The Detroit News first reported that Ford had directed dealers to pause deliveries of Mach-Es after issuing a recall for more than 300,000 2021-25 Mach-Es. The reason: an unexpected discharge of the vehicle's 12-volt battery under certain conditions could cause the front-door electronic latches to retain their last lock or unlocked status.

That was the issue that resulted in the lockout in Gordon's vehicle. He's still waiting on a software update for the issue, and until then, he won't drive his children in the Mach-E.

2025 vehicles make up smaller share of recalls

Recalls for 2025 vehicles represent a smaller share of Ford's recalls this year than 2024 model years did at this time last year. A Detroit News analysis found that the 34 recalls that included model year 2025 have accounted for 38% of 2025's recalls. That's compared to 19 recalls that included 2024 models in 2024 a year ago, representing more than half — 51% — of the recalls the company had issued so far that year. In all of 2024, Ford issued 67 recalls.

Public documents on the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's website for each of the recalls don't list a breakdown for the number of affected vehicles for each model year in the recall. Ford declined to provide a more detailed list.

But looking at the total number of vehicles in those recalls, although Ford has recalled more vehicles this year, it may be recalling fewer of its newest vehicles. The recalls in 2025 that included model year 2025 accounted for 14% of the vehicles affected by recalls this year. That entailed almost 818,000 of nearly 6 million vehicles recalled this year.

In comparison, recalls in 2024 through July of that year that included model year 2024 represented almost 27% of vehicles affected by recalls at this point last year. That totaled more than 986,000 vehicles of close to 3.7 million recalled vehicles at that point.

From 2023 to 2025, model year 2025 is found in 43 recalls so far, with those recalls including a total of 907,300 vehicles across model years. Model year 2024 was in 22 recalls by the end of July 2024, entailing almost 1.2 million vehicles. In total, model year 2024 has appeared in 69 recalls since those vehicles launched, with those recalls encompassing nearly 5 million vehicles across model years.

Ford's response

Recalls issued this year go as far back as model year 2015, and 14 entail single-digit volumes — as few as two vehicles. That's a result of Ford working to improve its speed in identifying and fixing recalls, Halliburton said. That may result in more recalls, but encompass fewer vehicles, he said.

Contributing to more than a third of this year's recalls also is the reissuance of 33 software recalls that date to 2017 after an audit found the company didn't have a robust way of ensuring the software was in the right place, Halliburton said.

In 2025, meanwhile, results on quality from when a new vehicle is delivered to the dealer and in the first three months of ownership are among the best the company has seen, Halliburton said. Since 2021, Ford owners have been experiencing 25% fewer initial quality issues, and 2025 models are seeing a 10% improvement in initial quality compared to 2024.

"I'm not declaring victory yet, it being our best year ever, but all the metrics are saying we are on track to be," he said.

"Now that we identified the problem, we have a mechanism by which we can guarantee that the dealers confirm with us exactly what software was updated," he said. "The technician knows that they've got the right software in the vehicle, and we know they've got the right software on the vehicle, so we've closed that gap."

Ford has more than doubled the number of safety and technical experts it employs in the past two years and increased testing to detect failure on powertrain, steering and breaking systems, Kumar Galhotra, chief operating officer, wrote in a blog post earlier this month. The company has also updated its software validation processes.

"In applying these new standards, we can and do find issues that exist on earlier model years, including ones that have not even been reported," Galhotra wrote. "We will not compromise our responsibility to all our customers, not just those buying new vehicles."

Ford is also focused on leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning to detect issues sooner, Halliburton said. Shoring up manufacturing operations, adding camera systems and implementing plant-specific targets for process improvements are also ways in which Ford is seeking to improve quality.

In J.D. Power's 2025 Initial Quality Study looking at consumers' first 90 days of ownership, the Ford brand has more top finishers in their respective segment than any other, though General Motors Co.'s brands overall had the most top-ranked vehicles in their segments.

Still, the IQS scores for Ford and luxury brand Lincoln overall fell below the industry average. There is a strong correlation, said Frank Hanley, J.D. Power's senior director of auto benchmarking for IQS, between IQS results and what consumers say in J.D. Power's dependability study that looks at their experience after three years of ownership. Ford and Lincoln were also below average there, but they were the most improved brands.

"The area they're really suffering in are really where a lot of other ones are, as well," Hanley said. "With the amount of technology that's getting introduced into cars with all the driving assistance features and larger screens and all this additional technology that's coming in, it's definitely creating some complications for manufacturers."

Ford is set to report second-quarter financial results on Wednesday after the bell. Quality issues have been a financial problem for Ford in the recent past.

In the second quarter of 2024, unexpected warranty charges for 2021 model-year vehicles and older increased costs by $700 million year-over-year to between $1.5 billion and $2 billion. It prompted Ford to reduce its 2024 outlook for operating income of its Ford Blue internal combustion engine and hybrid vehicle business by $1 billion.

"Our quality is improving," John Lawler, then Ford's chief financial officer and now vice chair, said at the time. "We're seeing that in our internal numbers. ... That's going to pay dividends for us from a warranty standpoint down the road. And so, what you should think about is that was one time in the quarter. It was for previous model years."

In 2025, Chief Financial Officer Sherry House has said Ford continues to address its cost structure, quality and warranty expenses. The company is on track for $1 billion in operating profit savings in 2025 from those measures, excluding tariffs, she said during a first-quarter earnings call.

Citing its quiet period before posting earnings results, Ford declined to provide an estimate of how long it will take to get beyond the quality errors of the past affecting financial results.

"We see the improvement in all the numbers," Halliburton said. "Everything is going down."

Jim Seavitt, owner of Village Ford in Dearborn, said since many recalls are software fixes, they can be issued over the air or fairly quickly at the dealership's service department.

Recalls, however, can hinder sales. The pause on deliveries of the Mach-E last month, for example, came as demand for the EV was increasing as negotiations in Congress were underway about ending the up-to-$7,500 federal tax credit incentive for plug-in vehicles. That has a software fix, but when the solution is hardware-related, it can take months to get the new part.

"We had customers who wanted to get a Mach-E and couldn’t," he said. "It was just for a week. It’s more frustrating when it’s longer."

For his part, Gordon, the Mach-E owner from California, originally was told by Ford that he would have to pay for repair costs on his vehicles, despite an extended warranty. After sharing his story online in hopes of protecting other families, Ford and executives reached out and sent engineers to look at his vehicle at the dealership, though Gordon is unable to share details of that response.

"Ford was overall doing a pretty good job of making sure it was right," he said.

He's open to buying a Ford and Mach-E again, but would prefer some kind of mechanical key for instances like the one that happened with his son: "I've worked in tech before, and software fixes to what I consider a hardware issue isn't a perfect solution."

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