Ford says new small cars will have the ‘highest quality ever’

Directly challenging Toyota, FoMoCo’s quality chief Bennie Fowler, said that Ford’s line of new compact cars will launch with the best quality in the industry. He said Ford will try to keep the new line of small cars from Europe to having an average of 800 things gone wrong per 1,000 vehicles

“The vehicles we deliver in 2010 will be the highest quality ever,” Fowler told industry executives at the annual Management Briefing Seminars. “We’re playing to win.”

Fowler said that it will send five to ten of its hourly workers from each U.S. plant to Wayne State University this fall to get full training to become certified Six Sigma black belts – an industry standard for quality expertise.

Ford is hoping to build on the quality gains it has made over the past several years, which have allowed the Dearborn automaker to challenge Toyota and other Japanese automakers at the top of influential rankings like the recently released J.D. Power and Associates annual survey of vehicle dependability.

Source: Detroit News