In my honest opinion, I see white collars doing the heavy lifting designing new products but operational costs are still high. In my experience when I spend time at plants I see very high inefficiency. Plants workers ask for weekend work but don’t accomplish much. Especially sundays they literally don’t do a thing. Even on weekdays if you ask them to do one thing - they take hours. UAW needs to pull itself up. It always white collar and management getting all the blame. UAW jobs are more safer than Federal govt jobs it seems.
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I agree with the OP based on all the worker caused quality issues from the last Explorer launch at CAP. The trim and final workers were intentionally not making the snap connections on the electrical harnesses throughout parts of the body. This created a project to develop and deploy digital wearables that can detect the snap sound and records that the connections have been made in station. Sad and disgusting that people do not take pride in what they make or understand where they pay comes from; that they are hurting others.
As an salaried engineer I can say op is 100% wrong.
Engineering, production Management and purchasing is fawked up.
Still some good people left but a lot of i competence.
Ford tries to save a penny but they lose a dollar in supply chain disruptions, poor quality and warranty work.
The idea of the ev transformation is you charge a fortune for a vehicle that requires less engineering and less labor. White collar, blue collar - we fire everyone.
Who engineers the cr---y parts the Unions workers put the car?
Don't blame them for recalls. You engineers rely to much of the suppliers to do the work.
Why don't you spend some time at he plant and see what's going on.
Did you see the last GTH? MAP offered to make parts and were brushed over. We are #1 in recalls because we keep outsourcing parts (and upper management knows this). We need to work with the plants to make them more efficient.
Fighting the UAW (U Ain't Workin') is a losing battle. They will never go away and will continue to strangle every company that puts up with their BS.
30 years in engineering nearly all in PD, Lab or vehicle testing so I wont comment on the UAW manufacturing, however I will say that the labyrinth of processes that PD must perform to satisfy the mountain of requirements of every ECU, wire, nut and bolt, etc. for these machines in almost impossible to explain to anyone who does not have direct knowledge of how it is done.
Wasted time on needless process never shows up on the balance sheet.
Sure it is inefficient. As we move to a higher mix of EVs and fewer ICE, many jobs will have to disappear. UAW negotiations will get interesting. Good luck on finding efficiencies in plant labor this time around.
Mfg and industrial platform are the big things leadership mentioned during earnings as highly inefficient (they said around 30%). It’ll be interesting to see how that changes