Plant Tour
Today we took a tour of one of Thor’s plants in Elkhart,IN. The young man that gave the tour worked in sales and was really seemed to know the process well. I bought a new Thor Daybreak in 2013 and h...
Forum Discussion
It would probably have been more accurate to say that they can't check everything at their current price points. With enough money, everything (or practically everything) could be checked.
I work for a company in the chip making business. Making chips is a very complex and involved process, and requires generally more stringent quality control than building trailers or motorhomes, if only because smaller errors/faults will cause significant problems. Outgoing quality levels for chips (once through production and testing) are measured in DPM -- defective parts per million, somewhere in the low 100's range I think for typical consumer-level chips. (I may be off on that; I'm a couple steps removed from such details.) That doesn't mean that the production line makes 99.99% good chips, not by a long shot; but through thorough automated testing, the bad ones are virtually all screened out.
Exactly how much time (and hence money) is spent on testing and verification depends to a large extent on the value of the chip and of the device it goes into. A chip destined for a satellite, for instance, where repair or replacement in outer space would cost billions, will receive far more testing and verification than one that goes into a $10 wristwatch.
If RV buyers demanded (and were willing to pay for) consistent quality, I suspect the builders would be able to achieve that...after a lot of (possibly painful) work.
I work for a company in the chip making business. Making chips is a very complex and involved process, and requires generally more stringent quality control than building trailers or motorhomes, if only because smaller errors/faults will cause significant problems. Outgoing quality levels for chips (once through production and testing) are measured in DPM -- defective parts per million, somewhere in the low 100's range I think for typical consumer-level chips. (I may be off on that; I'm a couple steps removed from such details.) That doesn't mean that the production line makes 99.99% good chips, not by a long shot; but through thorough automated testing, the bad ones are virtually all screened out.
Exactly how much time (and hence money) is spent on testing and verification depends to a large extent on the value of the chip and of the device it goes into. A chip destined for a satellite, for instance, where repair or replacement in outer space would cost billions, will receive far more testing and verification than one that goes into a $10 wristwatch.
If RV buyers demanded (and were willing to pay for) consistent quality, I suspect the builders would be able to achieve that...after a lot of (possibly painful) work.
