It really is amazing. Cars have been on the road for 100 years. Yet nothing seems to be perfected. (Yeah, I know it’s not that simple.)
Some wise person (I forget who) recently remarked that the auto industry went south the moment they took the decision-making power away from the engineers and gave it to the accountants.
IMO it’s because they keep making them more and more complicated.
Or as I like to say......more crap that WILL break eventually.
When I was in school, long ago, a friend had an engineering internship at Ford.
His first job was to address a quality issue. Cars were leaking coolant.
He quickly traced the problem to when ford switched from using a real gasket on the thermostat housing, to using a paper ‘gasket’.
He said if we switch back to the real gasket, the problem will go away.
He was scolded and told ‘no way, that would add nine cents to the build cost of the car’.
Some wise person (I forget who) recently remarked that the auto industry went south the moment they took the decision-making power away from the engineers and gave it to the accountants.
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True in every industry. Boeing would be Exhibit A.
It’s called the Purchasing Dept. at the OEM.
Engineers at the OEM spec what something needs to do...suppliers come back with solutions, engineering plus tooling and BOM cost, where each is then subjected to purchasing folks, whom hammer them all on cost.
The result is pushing too far, corners get cut and quality drops, even if the selected supplier wasn’t the lowest bid.
Outside that, everyone is trying to innovate, leading to nothing being static and only maturing in design over years and years.
The thing with this one - it doesn’t cause ‘unintended ACCELERATION’ but only a ‘loss of power’. Is that really recall worthy? When did we decide that vehicle failures that relate to any sort of engine failure is a recall?