Jim Farley, CEO of the Ford Motor Company, was recently interviewed about automotive electrification, tariffs, competition from China, and how the industry is using technology to keep people from modifying their own cars. While the interview covered a lot of ground, it was loaded with the kind of non-answers CEOs are infamous for. But some of the responses he gave about locked ECUs and tuning were simultaneously enlightening and deeply troubling.
The interview was conducted by The Verge’s Decoder! podcast and spent a lot of time trying to get Farley to weigh in on Ford’s evolving strategy toward all-electric vehicles. While the guest host admitted to knowing precious little about automobiles, they did a reasonably good job. However, there was a portion where the normal host called into the program to ask the kind of question you might expect from a car enthusiast that really seemed to throw Ford’s chief executive for a loop — resulting in a rather suspect response.
“I have a 2021 Mustang GT convertible. It’s one of my favorite cars ever,” explained the show’s usual host, Nilay Patel. “People love this car because it’s so easy to mod and tune. You can just reprogram the engine control unit (ECU) to make the car go faster. But with the new version of the gas Mustang, the one with all the screens running on your new platform, the ECUs are locked. People can’t just reprogram them. A lot of enthusiasts attribute the recent drop in gas-powered Mustang sales to the locked ECUs.”
“My questions are: Do you agree with that, that the locked ECUs are behind the recent drop in gas-powered Mustang sales? Do you have a plan to let people unlock the ECUs and tune the car more easily?”
While the guest host quickly admitted that they had no idea what any of that meant, Ford CEO Jim Farley laughed and acknowledged he understood exactly what the caller was asking. Then, he entered into a personal anecdote that dodged him having to answer the question.
Farley’s transcribed response taken from The Verge:
I have this debate with my son, actually, because he has an older Mustang. He didn’t buy the new one for reasons like that. I would absolutely say the drop in sales is not due to that. Actually, we’re doing really well with Mustang. I think we’re the only one left really, which we’re quite proud of. We’re investing a lot in Mustang. I think the thing people don’t get about Mustang is that it’s a global car. It’s the best-selling sports coupe in the world. We outsell Mustang outside of the US than inside the US. When I look at sales for Mustang, I look at globally. The Mustang continues to grow in some of our biggest countries like Australia and Sweden because people want a little slice of that America. Everyone wants to do a burnout.
As far as the vehicle’s tunability, I think the call-in question is outstanding. This is a real dilemma for us, and there’s no easy answer. We want people to modify their cars, but we also have to take quality and privacy really seriously. I think he was talking more about the performance of the vehicle, and over time, our approach would be to give people the option to digitally adjust their vehicle from Ford, so that we can maintain quality but still let the user have their own idea of performance. That’s different for everyone, and I think that vision will come to life in the coming years.
The aftermarket is a real opportunity, but it’s also a big challenge for us because a lot of people like to write software in the control module that controls the powertrain to get better performance. But what they don’t know, and what the user may not be aware of, is that all the reliability and the quality issues that might come up are very expensive. My daughter’s boyfriend is one of these people. He bought a brand new F-150, he’s got a supercharger on it. He recently got a bunch of error codes because he updated the ECU against Ford’s standards, and now he needs thousands of dollars of expensive repairs because the vehicle has started chewing its camshaft. It was great that he could get 650 horsepower out of his EcoBoost F-150. He didn’t think about what he was doing to the reliability of the vehicle, but we have to at Ford.
All I would say is that it’s a tough problem to solve. We always want to give customers a chance to tune their vehicles, but we actually know a lot about the reliability of the vehicle. Are we as a brand going to let our quality reputation suffer to give a person the ability to modify the vehicle? I think that’s a hard compromise for us to make.
Issue one is that the EcoBoost F-150 has never been offered with a supercharger. While Farley presumably misspoke, it’s a little embarrassing to have the high-paid, visible face of your company make a mistake when referencing its products.
Unless his daughter’s boyfriend is going deep into an experimental F-Series build, in which case he obviously knew the risks, the CEO must have meant he added a supercharger to a V8-equipped F-Series. More probably, Farley could have simply confused turbochargers — which the F-150 EcoBoost does have — with superchargers.
Issue two is that the Ford Mustang is indeed losing sales on the very same market that made it a success to begin with. Mustang sales were down by nearly 32 percent through the first quarter of 2025 and 2024 was already the worst sales year in the model’s entire 60-year history. Worse yet, they were declining steadily before that. As much as Blue Oval wants to act like that’s not a big deal, it absolutely is unless China plans on making up the difference.
Issue three is that Farley’s overall response effectively just avoids him having to answer the question, meaning the true answer is probably that Ford absolutely does not want to unlock ECUs and doesn’t want to say so because the company knows it’ll make people angry. I sincerely doubt it has anything to do with the reasons the CEO provided in the interview. Farley might have called it “a tough problem to solve.” But it’s really more of a change Ford intentionally made and doesn’t want to go back on unless forced to.
If automakers actually cared about customer privacy, they wouldn’t have collectively spent the last fifteen years installing increasingly invasive data-harvesting technology into their products while permanently connecting them to the internet. The entire nature of how modern automobiles are designed make them inherently vulnerable to remote hacking and data breaches. The same is true of the information that they accumulate and then compile at manufacturer-owned data centers.
Companies might not want to see that data stolen. But the relevant businesses ultimately believe it’s in their best interest to obtain and then sell it themselves, creating an elevated risk for their customer base simply because they view it as potentially profitable. It’s deemed an acceptable level of endangerment for the customer to undertake so the manufacturer can reap the rewards and remain competitive relative to rival automakers.
As for the Farley’s claims of reliability, it’s certainly true that you can tune your vehicle’s engine into a ticking timebomb. We’ve seen tuning acolytes do this for ages by trying to access every last smidgen of power available from their cars, knowing that they’ve negatively impacted the longevity of the powertrain in the process. There were turner-approved models that built their reputations around how much horsepower they could reliably take via bolt-ons and tunes with mostly stock internals. The Honda Civic became famous for this in the 1990s. But it was hardly the first or only example of this throughout history.
These are not really new concerns and automakers likewise do not appear to be building more robust vehicles than they used to when aftermarket tuning was still easier to do. If Ford wasn’t presently seeing so many recalls, or had models that were living up to the long-term reliability benchmarks set by the industry thirty years ago, some of Farley’s arguments might actually work.
But they aren’t so they don’t. Car makers seem significantly more interested in leveraging the latest technological bauble to help rationalize swelling MSRPs and working out elaborate financing terms that will help get Average Joe into a gargantuan six-figure SUV with a small, emissions-compliant motor mated to a complicated hybrid system and/or CVT.
It’s no secret that I have some strong opinions regarding modern automobiles and the current state of the industry. But it’s not like I’m alone in holding them. Whether we’re talking about the overarching Right-to-Repair movement, venerable automotive writers who have watched the industry pivot into suspect territory over the last two decades, or plain-old disgruntled customers feeling like they’re being ripped off, many drivers are fed up with the automotive sector leveraging technology for the purpose of gatekeeping. It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about ” sealed transmission” with alleged “ lifetime fluids” or manufacturer-locked ECUs — none of it has been popular with consumers, mechanics, or aftermarket companies.
We’ve heard from too many retiring insiders claiming that engineers were gradually sidelined so that accountants can make all the important decisions. Granted, a lot of these choices (e.g. subscriptions, customer data harvesting, software gatekeeping) are supposed to result in automakers seeing bigger payouts in the short term. But they’re likewise obliterating any goodwill brands might have carried into the future with the next generation.
In the past, an automaker delivered you a product that was yours to do with as you pleased once you had paid it off. Cars were historically deemed “good” when they proved to be impressively reliable, staggeringly beautiful, outstandingly comfortable, enjoyable to drive, easy to work on, or any combination of the above. Meanwhile, servicing a vehicle is essential to keep it running and also being able to modify them helps guarantee there’s a demographic of invested gearheads willing to splurge on fun models with difficult-to-rationalize MSRPs.
However, today’s industry doesn’t seem particularly interested in most of that. Boomers had an entire lineup of muscle cars to tune. Generation X had Japanese imports with loads of aftermarket support. Millennials saw a limited resurgence of both and at least had older modules to fiddle with. But it doesn’t look like the younger generations will have much of anything if the industry maintains its current trajectory of data stockpiling and technological gatekeeping. Modern cars are becoming too specialized for shade-tree mechanics and the industry no longer seems to consider what a vehicle will actually be like to live with on a daily basis.
I know this has always been a problem. When ECUs were first introduced, they were a nightmare for average mechanics. Early systems were failure prone and not particularly robust. Meanwhile, the local shop you brought your vehicle to probably didn’t even have the proprietary equipment necessary to run the proper diagnostics. However, once on-board-diagnostics ports were standardized by the government, the problem quickly alleviated itself and eventually opened the door to performance tuning applications. But the interim years were rough for everybody.
While statements from CEOs are often meaningless, existing exclusively to drive hype around the brand that pays their salary, there’s often a lot to glean for those willing to read carefully between the lines. This is certainly true of the interview with Farley, and I’d encourage anyone curious about what Ford’s near-future plans are to listen to (or read it) in full. Jim is fairly candid during several questions, most notably about electrification, vehicle pricing, U.S. employment, and planning future products.
But he also goes out of his way to praise how cooperative China has been with its automakers, coyly throwing shade at the United States. A clear emphasis was likewise placed upon praising EVs and assuming they’re the obvious future of motoring early in the interview. This is presumably due to so much of Ford’s past developmental efforts going toward plug-in vehicles. Regardless of how North America actually feels about EVs and modern vehicle tech, or how wrong the industry has been in the past, it’s the CEO’s job to reassure the public that there’s no reason for a company to change course because the future they’ve invested into has already been decided.
[Images: Ford Motor Company; RMT51/Shutterstock]
Become a TTAC insider. Get the latest news, features, TTAC takes, and everything else that gets to the truth about cars first by subscribing to our newsletter.
