Ford's answers to the NHTSA 6.7 Investigation

NewsW wrote:

Greg Bunting wrote:
NewsW and BenK; for those of us who are too dumb to even know the questions, can you educate us on the acronyms? Is it FMEA or FEMA?
Still, this thread is a 'must read'. Carry on!

First, there is no such thing as "too dumb to even know the questions".


Having said that, FMEA:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Failure_mode_and_effects_analysis

A failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA) is a procedure in product development and operations management for analysis of potential failure modes within a system for classification by the severity and likelihood of the failures. A successful FMEA activity helps a team to identify potential failure modes based on past experience with similar products or processes, enabling the team to design those failures out of the system with the minimum of effort and resource expenditure, thereby reducing development time and costs. It is widely used in manufacturing industries in various phases of the product life cycle and is now increasingly finding use in the service industry. Failure modes are any errors or defects in a process, design, or item, especially those that affect the customer, and can be potential or actual. Effects analysis refers to studying the consequences of those failures.

We are only able to do the work with excellent information provided by people who have experienced the failure, and reported back to us what they saw, heard, etc.

The guessing game then goes to basically beating up hypothesis until something is left standing.

None of us here have the resources of Ford, Bosch, GM, etc. which is the entry ticket for serious work.

But at least, we can read technical journals, trade experiences, and speculate.

Speculate is the word.

Yep -seems we have reached a point of "consumer gambling" when buying a new diesel truck engine -at least in the light duty market segment. Clearly technology required and reliability are divergent in this market segment for many reasons from cost constraints to fuel quality plus a whole host of others significant issues.