Recalls: The True Costs of Outsouricng Both The Part And The Quality Control

Implications: The Detroit Three followed the lead of Jacques Nasser at Ford in the early 1990s and began to eliminate internal supplier quality management and PPAP, production parts approval processes. After internal engineering supplier monitoring had been made into a supplier self approval regime came the outsourcing frenzy of the late 1990s. The result was that Chinese and Indian suppliers were self certifying and that has been a disaster.

Analysis: I doubt that a single worker in whatever Indian or Chinese factory that produced the defective heating wiring for windshield washer fluid bottles and lines, which has caused GM to recall and pay for probably 200 million dollars worth of retrofit wiring harness "with fuses," had any idea what he was building was for. The Indian engineer who designed the system probably didn't think of putting an inline fuse in the system, because, after all, if the wiring breaks, it will simply result in an open circuit that doesn't draw current. The idea that the wiring he was designing would be packed with an engine compartment and that the broken wire could fall onto a grounded mass of metal and thus draw enough current to turn red hot and ignite combustibles around it was not for the Indian engineer to contemplate. He never saw the completed car.

I have no doubt that this scenario was not only responsible for the GM recall of nearly 1,000,000 vehicles but that it has been and will be responsible for many, many more such recalls totaling billions of dollars.

Accountants, not engineers, are making safety related decisions today at GM.

Can you imagine the disasters waiting to happen to the Volt and to its luckless owners?