The modern automotive industry has grown to monstrous proportions, and with it, so have its supply chains, number of employees and general complexity of operations undertaken. That’s why it’s very difficult for these large-scale manufacturers to operate small changes in the production cycle of a vehicle, or recall just the ones it knows are affected when a recall is in effect.
This is a problem and a major inconvenience for literally millions of people: being caught up in a gigantic recall of hundreds of thousands of cars to find only a few faultily built ones…
However, now GM is showing its way of making the whole process of sorting out manufacturing defects after the car has been released much easier for both themselves and the owners through more careful tracking of the manufacturing process. This has allowed them to make a very accurate recall that involved only 4 Chevy Volts instead of hundreds or thousands of cars.
Automotive News tells the tale. Apparently, it was discovered this year that some 2012 Volts may have been fitted with a faultily manufactured brake valve. However, instead of recalling all Volts to search for and sort it out, GM took a much smarter approach to finding a fix.
According to the report, GM allocated one of its engineers to search into a database that tracks the parts used in its cars, and collects manufacturing records from suppliers, which in the case of the Volt, happened to be TRW Automotive. It took a month to pinpoint the U.S. cars with the problematic valve.
They were able to do it because the part in question came with detailed information from its manufacturer. They then tracked down the cars fitted with the defective part and found out it was only four Volts – imagine how much less of a hassle this was, as opposed to recalling en masse, for both manufacturer and owners.
This represents the future of recalls, and manufacturers who are not currently heading in this direction of marking all parts either with bar codes or radio frequency tags should really reconsider their steps. It will definitely pay for itself in the future…
By Andrei Nedelea
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