One of our customers brought back his 2-week old Peugeot and demanded his money back. Why? The navigation told him to go right and turns out recently this street in Paris was changed to 1-way traffic. He got a fine.
So the car was returned to the dealer. They stripped the whole dashboard to get the device. It was analyzed in Frnace, then sent to us in Netherlands. The developers coudn't figure it out. We went on a special test drive to Paris when we found out this situation was changed. All in all thousands of Euro's wasted to figure out something so simple.
Another one from a little further back. Back then I was tasked with guiding these new Euro 6 Heavy-Duty engines through our production lines. So basically I have to walk along and take notes on any problems encountered. Later I'd have to fix them. So this engine is specifically for busses. We provided all sizes of our machinery to the folks @ R&D. They check in CAD, later by actually measuring on the first prototype. They say it fits. So we run it through our paint shop. All seems to be fine until we reach the paint dryer. The bus - air intake gets stuck. The engine is pushed off of its cart, hangs for a moment and then falls down 5 meters to the factory floor destroying an elevator, sensors, paint dryers and many more in it's fall. Total outage was two working days @ double shifts. Estimated cost of this mess-up? 1,5 million in lost output. 3,7 million in running costs of the factory and staff. The repair was cheap. 'Only' ~470k euros. Ooooops. Root cause? They use 5 different CAD-tools in our R&D department. Conversions were sometimes slightly scaled..
Turns out 3 months later after the Start Of Production of the MX-13 euro 6 engine our machines broke much more often. Why? It was my job to find it out and fix it. So I spent months checking everything possible. I compared all data, made measurements, engaged our repair guys to help out etcetera. Turned out to become a big project. We just couldn't figure it out.
One day I'm getting a coffee inside the factory. One of the guys driving forklifts told me at the coffee machine the solution. He asked me: 'how much do the new engines weigh?'. So I delved into all the CAD-drawings and documentation. I spent a full week finding info and arranging meetings with R&D.
In the end I got the number of 1700 kilos. Next morning we took an engine off the assembly line. Turns out its actually 2381 kg. Our factory was built for max. 2000 kg. Production never stopped (who cares for safety) and the cost to update was more than 13 million euro's. Similar amounts would have to be spent in the UK, USA and in Brazil.
Most shocking to me was that in a big multinational truck builder with thousands of engineers nobody knew or cared how much the engine weighed in reality. Everybody was shocked and a planned model update was expedited to cope with it and make sure the truck would actually be as efficient as advertised.
Once got really mad too there. I purchased this 30.000 euro torque wrench with which to tighten the steering axis bolts. Rather important to make sure our customers were safe. Miracuously it kept breaking. Until I worked overtime once and saw them lazy sh**ts use it as a hammer!!! They wouldn't walk 1
meter to grab a hammer when needed. Total repair costs? Close to 240k / year.
Biggest idiot story of the years is 'Dieselgate' though. In my career I've seen engineers change emission test results manually, been explained in school how they fake it (mind you that was 10 years ago), seen the changed soft- and hardware being implemented after bad results and still they claim it just happened. It's so obviously an institutional problem of the legislatory framework, in which they rely in a large part on the honesty of the manufacturer's engineers..
And I can continue to write a book on this I guess..
Originally Posted by drakkie
One of our customers brought back his 2-week old Peugeot and demanded his money back. Why? The navigation told him to go right and turns out recently this street in Paris was changed to 1-way traffic. He got a fine.
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