Why Things Fail: From Tires to Helicopter Blades, Everything Breaks Eventually

[valkraider]

Why Things Fail: From Tires to Helicopter Blades, Everything Breaks Eventually

This is why the sprawling hangar-size rooms of Ford’s Building 4 are full of machines. Machines that open and close doors, robots that rub padded appendages on seats, treadmills that spin tires until they erupt in a cloud of white smoke. There’s even a giant bay where an entire Ford pickup is held up in the air by pistons that violently shake the vehicle by its suspension. Officially, Building 4 is about reliability, but it’s actually more about inevitability. Ford isn’t trying to ensure the gas-pedal hinge will never break. The company knows it will break; its engineers are trying to understand when—and how and why—this will happen.

[CNCGeek]

Interesting article thanks for posting it.  Couple of the things I noted were the mention of their focus on weight savings (to improve fuel economy) and the decline in warranty payments.  I can see the result of the weight saving measures on the C-max with the lack of a jack and spare, plastic structures under the hood and even a missing transmission dipstick - and probably 100's of other things here and there.  It was also interesting to read about the decline in warranty claims, which is good for everyone.  However I'm a bit skeptical that the decline was entirely the result of quality improvement since there could be several ways to lower the warranty claims including selling extended warranties with higher deductables and being more aggressive in warranty claim denials.

[darrelld]

Ford is conducting a practical excercise in overcoming the second law of thermodynamics.