I feel exonerated.

Just before I retired from G.M. I worked test driving their vehicles. Drove the SUV's manufactured in my home town, Lansing, Michigan. I brought a safety issue to their attention involving the wipers, which involved them icing up and losing significant vision through the windshield. I went so far as to personally hunt down the engineer who was in charge of that part of the vehicles involved and also talked to the assistant plant manager. Both told me I didn't know what I was talking about and that the wipers had been "tested extensively" in the lab. I did tell them that the "lab" was not real world and that the purpose of the test drive program was to find issues that didn't show up in the lab.

I see in the news today that the Feds have cracked down on this issue and that G.M. is recalling 50,000 vehicles to fix a freezing issue with the wipers in Northern states. Sure would have saved them the grief if they had listened right at the beginning of the program.

I'm sure that they will try to blame the guy that isn't there anymore.

My 2006 had issues with the ice building up on the blades and around their path so bad a I'd have to pull over and clear the dammed ice and snow from around the base and sides. I had the automatic climate control, but you had to crank the temp way up if using defrost just to get it to somewhat melt. It would get hot enough in the cab I was driving with the windows down to keep from sweating me out.

Isn't it interesting how some engineers put more faith in lab results than real-world results?

The ice problem on my Hummer was so bad that I had to install heated wiper blades and a heated windshield washer system.

I have found Engineers to be a strange breed. Most are never wrong if you ask them.

Probably one of the hardest things to have to do if you ever get to sit in the hot seat is to make a decision to stop production going out the door.

Having sat in that seat before today, the picture is not as simple as it may seem to those that have not faced all the facets involved. Thing here is from your story i wonder if this issue ever made it further than the two guys responsible.

But from my experience with corporations as long as the "corrective action" or "root cause" approach is carried out in the form of a witch hunt rather than a sensible investigation of a problem that has and can occur when you develop new widgets, then people will never voluntary fess up.

They all talk a good talk of quality circles and sigma black belts and who knows what else but when stopping output means no revenue in the next days weeks and months and news of a issue potentially hits the market and the share price gets hit because of extrapolated perception of losses as a result, then no one wants to muster the courage to pull the plug. Its easier to make a provision on the balance sheet for warrantys and recalls and just deal with it later. The market accepts that there are funds allocated for this kind of thing and the impact is far less severe later.

This kind of conduct catches up though as we have seen happen in several industries and across the world.

In my profit sharing scheme i evolved, one of the key performance metrics used in the determination of profit share is the cost of quality. That is derived from what moneys have to be credited back to distributors or agents and what write offs have to be taken to remedy the situation.

I guess the fact that they cut your program says a lot on its own about how committed they were to finding out the truth.


Its a bitter sweet victory though but its great to be exonerated.

I think a couple of Post Cards with "I TOLD YA SO" on it would be in order