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> Another car company would not have delivered cars to the dealers if they knew that components were faulty at the time of delivery Very Very doubtful. There i

> Another car company would not have delivered cars to the dealers if they knew that components were faulty at the time of delivery Very Very doubtful. There is some accountant math that goes into those types of decisions. If that car made it all the way to the buy off ride and into manufacturing with those components and it was found later that they failed faster than expected or didn't always work quite right. They are not going to hold those cars back unless it causes a catastrophic and probably fatal, to the occupants, failure. Otherwise they will hope it will fail outside of warranty and charge your for it.

coredog64 6y ago
My wife’s cousin is a dealer mechanic, and he described this really perverse incentive WRT GM. If the dealership sees a particular failure mode and reports it to GM, then they’ll issue a TSB (or maybe even trigger a recall). But in doing so, they’ll only pay a fixed fee to the dealer. Instead, what happens is that the dealer has an incentive to build a local knowledge base on how to fix the common problems but not share it with GM as they can bill the repairs hourly. (The specific failure mode he used as an example was inadequate weatherproofing in door electrics. The local fix was to pop-rivet the bottom of a plastic container in the right place so as to improve weather resistance)
gamblor956 6y ago
You are referring to the Pinto Analysis. Car manufacturers don't do that anymore. They learned from Ford's mistake with the Pinto. Also, it costs significantly more to replace parts by recall than it does to simply hold back vehicles at the factory, on the order of 10-20x as much $$$, since there are additional legal and regulatory requirements associated with recalls, and generally releasing a car with known flawed parts means treble damages come into play in any legal proceeding (meaning, 3x damages awarded to the plaintiff).

coredog64 6y ago

My wife’s cousin is a dealer mechanic, and he described this really perverse incentive WRT GM. If the dealership sees a particular failure mode and reports it to GM, then they’ll issue a TSB (or maybe even trigger a recall). But in doing so, they’ll only pay a fixed fee to the dealer. Instead, what happens is that the dealer has an incentive to build a local knowledge base on how to fix the common problems but not share it with GM as they can bill the repairs hourly. (The specific failure mode he used as an example was inadequate weatherproofing in door electrics. The local fix was to pop-rivet the bottom of a plastic container in the right place so as to improve weather resistance)

gamblor956 6y ago

You are referring to the Pinto Analysis. Car manufacturers don't do that anymore. They learned from Ford's mistake with the Pinto. Also, it costs significantly more to replace parts by recall than it does to simply hold back vehicles at the factory, on the order of 10-20x as much $$$, since there are additional legal and regulatory requirements associated with recalls, and generally releasing a car with known flawed parts means treble damages come into play in any legal proceeding (meaning, 3x damages awarded to the plaintiff).