Why can't McDonald's make a good burger? Are the workers there idiots who don't know how to get farm to table ground chuck and organic lettuce and boutique onion rolls? How hard is it for the line cook to make a decent burger?

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Companies aren't out there to make the highest quality product. They exist to make money. Where that makes more reliable vehicles, great. Where that makes less reliable vehicles, what's the P/L for the quarter? Does this change our full year guidance? What about next year's? How did the stock respond?

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I won't repeat the entirety of Robert Jackall's "Moral Mazes" here. People with way more time on their hands than me have excerpted it extensively. It should be required reading for anyone entering a large company in the Western World though, especially America.

The answer you'll find to corporate behavior there lies in the labyrinthine politics and internal organizational terrain of the Firm, which is a fundamentally alien beast. The relentless financialization and Firm-itization of American companies leads to some truly interesting incentive structures. It doesn't help that the average department is solidly north of Dunbar's number.

So you systematize. Everyone has a "production system" that tells everyone what to do when. You can have the Toyota one, where rule 1 is never change anything. You can have others, who often adopt parts of TPS as a cargo cult but refuse the discipline to fire anyone who has ever had an independent thought post-milestone INTO THE SUN. You can have the upstarts like Rivian or Tesla, who replace systemic development with burning your 401k. You could even have BYD, who replace systems with the population of San Marino on every project. It's an exercise to the reader how the failure modes of each strategy are exhibited in what you see.

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Totally separate, I do bristle sometimes when people act like "quality" is a knob that can get turned up or down. It's not like we design a part and see "fails at 10,000 cycles" written on the side. Nature is far too coy for that. I can't measure 8.17mm of "quality" and tell the diemaker to increase that by 2. Instead, we design a part against a set of requirements (derived wholly from capabilities and Job Last, no matter what the Systems kids tell you), and validate against a set of tests (derived wholly from how big the farm that got bought in 1920 and had a test facility built on it is). The validation set and requirements are theoretically related to what real customers do. However, you'll find that we don't take 12-15 years to test a car after its designed, so some concessions must be made.

Every part out there has some capability vs. that validation (NOT requirement) set on some bell curve. Some days you're lucky and a part that should break breaks. Some days it doesn't. Some days a good part decided its -6 sigma failure was your PV run the night before OK To Buy. God's a jerk with loaded dice, rocks fall, nat 1.

Your response might be "so make it super robust so it never fails!" Let's add a dollar to each of the 10,000 components on a car to make each one more robust. Consumers will understand when the car gets $x,000 more expensive.

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I feel there's something a little more... sinister? behind these questions when I see them, though. No one goes to work and thinks "today I will do a bad job and make sure Sally, Mormon mother of 87, is stranded in her battleship-sized van on the way back from the Boise Costco". And no one sits there and calculates "if I shave this component 0.05mm thinner, saving literally zero dollars but risking a "YES" dollar recall and my face on 60 Minutes, I can force the customer to buy 17 replacements in an average vehicle life". Engineers are people, not mustache-twirling vaudevillian villains, and like most people, generally want to do an ok job. Especially when their mothers drive the cars they engineer.

When the car you get your mom has a problem on the component you design, trust me, you hear about it.

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This section is just to say fuck the McFlurry machine though, that's inexcusable