Look at the financial industry. Sure, they tumbled recently, but they'd been going strong for years, and selling worthless products (bundled mortgages and securities) all along. The success of a company can be inflated by a number of means, none of which are directly related to the quality of their product.
In Ford's case it might be customer perception: customers THINK they're getting a better product, THINK they're being loyal americans by buying from an American company, THINK about brand loyalty ("our family's always been a Ford family"), THINK about the fact that Ford didn't go under (and make the association with product, when it actually might have more to do with perception) and so on and so forth. None of these things have anything really to do with the quality of the product actually being superior. I'm not arguing that it's NOT; I don't actually know. Ford MIGHT have a superior product. Or it could have just about exactly the same product as everyone else, with minor differences, and people buy Ford because of all of those OTHER reasons, that again, have nothing to do with the quality of the product. That would inflate the success of the company unnaturally above what product quality alone would.
The sole fact that Ford kept its head above the water while everyone else went under doesn't necessarily say anything about its product being superior. Does its product have quality? Probably. Cars aren't like bundled securities; it's pretty easy to tell when they're junk. But the company's success relies on enough other factors that it's hard to say that it's directly related to SUPERIOR quality product. They only really have to make a product that's about as good as everybody else's.