Ford is hiring 500 engineers to regain control over parts engineering and pricing – even as it eliminates other jobs and scours the company for savings, Automotive News reported.
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The paper said the move reverses Ford’s decade-long strategy of asking suppliers to engineer the parts though Ford will not resume manufacturing.
Ford began to bolster its engineering staff about a year ago and vehicles developed under Ford’s new engineering strategy will begin production next year, Automotive News said, adding that this is one of several efforts to deal with quality problems that hampered the launches of the Ford Focus, Escape and Explorer.
The paper said engineers will oversee nine major commodity groups and noted that Ford’s shift is bad news for suppliers that want to engineer systems, which is more profitable than producing components.
A spokesman told the paper Ford would reclaim some engineering work from Visteon, Robert Bosch, TRW Automotive, Johnson Controls, Lear and other Tier 1 suppliers.
Automotive News said Ford isn’t taking over all engineering for those nine commodity groups.
“We’re not exactly designing wheel cylinders for brakes or semiconductors on powertrain control modules,” the spokesman told the paper, adding: “If it’s something absolutely critical to vehicle performance or if having control will give us a commercial or quality advantage, we want to do it.”
