Re: Recall UA

[Brett Dikeman <brett@arthur.malebolge.com>]

>On Sun, 19 Apr 1998, Brett Dikeman wrote:
>
>> Dealer refused to own up to it(or even tow it home.)  Months later they
>
>Typical dealer...
Well, except this was practically all GM dealers.  More like, typical
american dealer...

>me there have been folks on this list that have experienced UA due to
>faulty ISV operation.   You need to be careful to be fair to all makes.
True, but the whole Audi thing was never _proven_ either way(there is
evidence to both driver error and design flaws(let's not get started on
it), Audi probably didn't know about it(unlike EVERY one of the cases
above, notably the Pinto, where Ford worked out the percentage of people
that would die, and how much money it would cost Ford, and it was less than
cost of recalling vehicles) and in only a very small number of cases was it
fatal or did the problem even happen(total causalties was something like
less than 5, right?  I only know of one death, and that was of the little
kid, but the mother ADMITTED to hitting the wrong pedal, so that case was
NOT the ISV.)  Also notice: no reported cases of UA with sticks.  My manual
5k doesn't have a nice huge warning sticker on it, because it takes a
small(but large enough) portion of grey matter to drive it.

Also note; when were these failures?  Keep in mind the average age of a
lister's car; mine is 11 years old. The "UA" incidents happened in
practically new vehicles...

I did see a ISV failure once that was weird; car couldn't hold an idle, and
would "bounce" between 1000rpm and 2000rpm.  Really odd.  Was considering
buying it, didn't after I saw it do that :)

I loved our 5kCST when we first got it; all of our friends thought the
coolant after-run fan(which does make a  tremendous roar, and there were
not many electrically operated cooling fans in 1987; I still have people
tell me, while looking in the engine compartment, "your fan belt sounds
weird.") was the car "taking off" :)  Several friends refused to go near it
:)

>In general I agree that foreign design engineering is superior in
>someways to domestic, but that isn't always the case.  Often you only
>need to recognize the intended audience to understand American design.
The intended audience is no excuse for putting up lousy designs and then
being too dishonest to fess up(or save lives.)  You know it's sad when a
car maker markets a car as "the car you KNEW amercia could build"(why
didn't it before?) :)


It probably has to do with the fact that in Europe, the market is smaller,
so if you f*ck up, you're in deep dog food with your customers, and your
government is going to come knocking on your door...in America, your
customers are too uninformed, and the government basically gets paid(can
you say...lobbyists?) to stay out of your hair if anything comes up.

Good example...that whole 20/20 thing on side-impact testing.  When someone
tested cars on a scale instead of pass/fail, guess which cars did the
worst...GM!  Guess who objected the most to funding the project, BEFORE any
testing was done?  GM!  Think they knew something no one else did?  I
wonder.

<end soapbox and non-content spew, I got it out of my system for the week :)>

Brett

------
Brett Dikeman
brett@pdikeman.ne.mediaone.net
~)-|
Hostes alienigeni me abduxerunt.  Qui annus est?
Te audire non possum.  Musa sapientum fixa est in aure.
Ita, scio hunc 'sig file' veterem fieri.
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