Ford’s 2025 Nightmare: Why This Could Be Their Worst Year Yet

Ford's 2025 roadmap reads like a horror script for legacy automakers.

Electric Dreams, Gasoline Reality

The company's EV transition hits brick wall after brick wall. Production delays stack up while Tesla and Chinese manufacturers eat their lunch. Ford's once-promising electric lineup now looks like a garage full of concepts that never quite made it to the highway.

Supply Chain Whiplash

Traditional suppliers can't keep pace with Ford's ambitious—some would say delusional—timelines. Critical components arrive late or not at all, forcing factory shutdowns that cost millions per day. Meanwhile, startups simply bypass the old guard and source directly from tech manufacturers.

Dealer Network Drag

That sprawling dealership network? Now it's an albatross. Franchise agreements prevent rapid pivots to direct sales, while showrooms full of gas-guzzlers gather dust as consumers flock to brands without baggage.

Investors aren't buying the turnaround story anymore—not when Ford's market cap looks like pocket change compared to crypto projects that actually deliver on their promises. Sometimes the smart money knows when to exit the combustion engine era and just stack digital assets instead.

Another day, another recall

Ford is recalling 1.9 million vehicles globally, with about 1.45 million in the U.S., due to a rearview camera issue that caused inverted, distorted, or blank images, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). The recall affects select model years for the Lincoln MKC, Navigator, Ford Mustang, F-250, F-350, F-450, F-550, Expedition, and Edge, among others.

Image source: Ford Motor Company.

Here's the kicker: Not all recalls are created equal in terms of how deeply they impact the automaker. For instance, a recall for 10 million vehicles that can be fixed over the air with software updates could be cheaper than 1 million vehicles that require a dealership visit, manual labor, and/or parts. Unfortunately, many of Ford's recalls this year have required some kind of physical inspection or fix for the impacted vehicles.

Ford's sheer volume of recalls compared to competitors is nothing short of alarming. In 2025 Ford has issued a record 109 recalls in the U.S.; the next closest competitor iswith a much less alarming 30 recalls. It's possible that Ford breaks 10 million vehicles recalled this year, which would be more than double the amount of vehicles it sold globally last year.

Previously in 2025 Ford has had recalls that could indeed be fixed over the air, but this doesn't appear to be the case for this recall. Ford said it was aware of 44,123 warranty claims worldwide related to this recall and dealers will inspect and replace vehicle cameras. If that rings a bell, that's perhaps because Ford agreed to pay a $165 million civil penalty in last November after an NHTSA investigation found that Ford failed to recall vehicles with defective rearview cameras in a timely fashion.

What it all means

The problem is that investors aren't yet seeing evidence that Ford's focus on quality is lowering its warranty claims costs, which again have dinged the automaker's earnings in the past. In fact, you can see on The Graph below that Ford's warranty costs as a percentage of revenue have been on the rise for years.

Data source: Ford SEC filings. Chart by author.

Another concerning aspect of Ford's plethora of recalls this year is that they cover an exhaustive list of problems including electronic, mechanical, or something less trivial such as trim issues. That suggests that it's more of an overall problem rather than one single fault on one vehicle, as was the case with' previous massive ignition switch recall years and years ago.

Now to be fair, one could argue a focus on quality and recalls are correlated: As Ford increases its focus on quality, the number of recalls rises because it finds more problems it wasn't initially hunting for. No matter how you slice it, it would certainly be nice to see some progress but 2025 seems like nothing short of a disaster for Ford's recalls. Let's just hope this one doesn't ding the automaker's upcoming earnings. Ford offers long-term investors a solid balance sheet and lucrative dividend yield, but it must fix its quality concerns and lower warranty costs.