- Ford has issued 31 recalls for almost 3.7 million vehicles in the first half of 2024.
- Tesla is the next-worst, announcing eight recalls for 2.6 million cars, though some problems were handled by over-air updates.
- Ford’s big rival, GM, has only recalled 655,867 vehicles in 2024.
Ford is nothing if not consistent. The American arm of the company got the quality control wooden spoon in 2023 for the third year running based on both the number of recalls it announced and the number of cars caught up in those campaigns. So we thought we’d do a mid-year check, and it turns out things look even worse for 2024.
The Dearborn team issued 54 recalls covering 5,692,135 vehicles across the whole of 2023, but with only six months of this year gone, Ford – and its Lincoln subsidiary – has already announced 31 recalls that affect 3,660,752 cars, trucks and SUVs.
Related: Ford Crowned Recall Champion In The U.S. For Third Year Straight
It could be that Ford has simply been unlucky in the first half of this year, but it’s going to have to go back in time and start building Toyotas if it’s to have any chance of the full-year figures not coming out worse than the 2023 total.
Ford does, of course, sell more vehicles than any other automaker, putting 1.9 million new ones on the road last year. But Toyota was only a hair’s breadth behind at 1.89 million and Chevrolet and GMC together built over 2.2 million, yet Ford issued far more recalls for more vehicles than GM, Honda, Toyota, Nissan, VW, and BMW combined.
Some of Ford’s biggest recalls so far in 2024 include over half a million F-150 trucks needing a software calibration to stop them unexpectedly shifting into first gear, and almost as many Bronco Sports and Mavericks that needed to return to dealers because their 12-volt batteries could be overused due to an electrical glitch.
Tesla is the next-worst offender after Ford. It has issued eight recalls for 2,552,178 vehicles, a poor result considering how few cars it sells versus Ford (1.8 million globally in 2023). If there’s any kind of silver lining here it’s that some of those recalls were handled by simple over-air updates, so they weren’t recalls in the traditional sense.
Chrysler came close to topping Tesla, and issued 20 more recalls than Elon’s company, though the number of affected cars was lower at 2,247,965. Kia, Honda (including Acura) and Toyota (including Lexus) all recalled just over 1 million cars, trucks and SUVs, but just look at how much better GM fared than any of them. The General has only recalled 655,867 vehicles in the first six months of 2024, putting it eighth on the leaderboard of shame.