And that is where I am at, so onward we go with some revelations about the car trade.
Having been an engineer in the automotive industry, I have seen it all.
BMW acquired Land Rover some years back, they wanted the technology with regards to a chassis, as they had never made a car with a independent chassis.
When the at the time new l322 model was to be launched (range rover) we had problems, big ones.
First a BMW went rogue on the Autobahn in Germany, killing the driver. The steering column collapsed.
The same column was fitted in the Range Rover. It kept a memory of steering position, mirror and chair position. So once set, it remembered where you liked it.
There were 2 keys, his and hers if you like. The car on the autobahn stopped working, and all systems failed, leading to the fatality. We had made around 2000 pre launch cars, every single one had to have said column replaced, every man woman in the factory was busy trying to change them, for months.
There was though a much bigger problem to come, one BMW refused to deal with!.
We took one car in that was to be sold a few months later. And it needed a panel change, whole right side panel. The welds had failed. This was structural and a critical safety issue.
We took another random 5 cars in to test the welds on them, all failed!.
A automatic welding process (robot) that BMW had installed was not set to the correct current., Thousands of bad vehicles had been made. By now the car had been released to the public.
To recall and fix them all would have meant Land Rover going out of business, so they instead buried their heads, and sold Land Rover to Ford. Ford sold the spare land on that Land Rover owned near Coventry, netting them 2 billion £'s. And when they realized the scale of the problem, they got out quick, and sold Land Rover to Tata in India.
Ford made a huge profit.
Not a single one of them l322 has ever been fixed, anyone driving one is driving a death trap, a very expensive one at that!
Like I said at the start, you can not fire a man that does not want to work for you!.
More to come soon.
