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Over-engineered car parts

To: mgs@Autox.Team.Net
Subject: Over-engineered car parts
From: "Scott Gardner" <gardner@lwcomm.com>
Date: Thu, 21 Aug 1997 22:37:44 +0000
> He never did replace it. I think the reason I don't have the answer to your 
> question is that most people that do things like this don't live to tell us 
> exactly why it didn't work like they expected it to. I suppose that there 
> was some lawyer at Rover that had the engineers put those stupid extra parts 
> in there because of some lateral force/bearing cracking and wheel flying off 
> legal crap.
> I see your point but I'm sure there was some reason probably pertaining to 
> the design of the bearing. All of this was meant in good fun, no flame 
> intended. I could tell you about the house PO that wired the house with lamp 
> cord and it "worked just fine" but I'm saving that for a lucas problem...
> 
> Chris Reichle
> 
Chris,
        I don't know if it's just British conservatism, but I head something 
a few weeks back that Jaguar was recalling a bunch of the XK8s for 
free replacement of some rear suspension piece.  Seems they realized 
that under the worst of their torture tests, the part COULD fail.  
They announced that even though no owner was likely to reproduce the 
conditions necessary to make them fail, they wanted to replace them 
anyway.  Kind of a far cry from the Ford internal memo where the bean 
counters weighed the cost of loss-of-life lawsuits versus recalling 
the Pintos with the bomb gas tank---and decided to go with the 
lawsuits as the cheaper option.
Scott

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