tditom said:
Karl-
I'm pretty sure you know what I was getting at. Do you really think that a name brand oil (not the olive oil jug that Fahr keeps showing) would actually lead to a "crash" in the middle of operation?
Let me put in a word – Yes. OK more than a word. Every day here in the San Francisco Bay Area people crash their cars, or crash into someone else’s car, for two main reasons:
Incompetence and / or mechanical failure.
In the `80’s Audi suddenly found that in its North American market, specifically the US, Soccer Moms were fatally pinning their kids against the back walls of their garages, people were making claims that there cars took off by all themselves while they frantically tried to stop the car in vain with its brakes.
This largely occurred only in the USA. Only the, then current, Nissan Z-car came very close to the numbers of “unintended acceleration” incidents Audi had. As you may recall, at that time Audi was crucified in the press and the court of public opinion. They made the fatal PR mistake, before they had clear evidence, that maybe the cause of such incidents was driver error.
At the time, the only real difference between Audis equipped with ZF Automatic transmission, as I recall, and other car companies using the same basic transmissions was Audi, for ergonomics, placed the brake pedal and accelerator pedal closer together than was standard practice and the transmissions were FWD versions.
Audi bought every Audi reported to suffer from “Unintended Acceleration” , wrecked or not, and sent them back to Germany to find the source problem as quickly as possible.
Audi had been very successful at that time with cutting edge technology etc. Reports were beginning to surface that people were actually stepping hard on the accelerator pedal thinking they were hitting the brake. Audi publicly stated that it could find nothing wrong with its cars. But no one would believe it and Audi’s Sales tanked.
The readership of Britain’s
Car magazine began writing to the Editor as to what the problem with Americans not knowing were their feet were to go and should they be worried about their Audi’s, which had no such problems. One reader, and I remember it to this day, wrote that “ Americans were too busy putting Garfield suction toys on their windows to know exactly where their feet were supposed to go!”
Road & Track magazine would publish an extensive article proving, conclusively, that people were hitting the gas pedal instead, even to the point of protest and that was the problem all along.
Road & Track had it all on tape. Audi would retrofit cars with shift locks and future versions of these models would have, in addition, the pedals spaced farther apart. But the damage was done and Sales would not recover until the advent of the Audi A4.
Toward the later part of that period I was in BMW NA’s Technician Training School. We were in a separate training program from that of Dealer Service personnel for most of our classes.
As part of our training we would service and repair cars. An M6/L6, I do not recall which one, came in with a clearly “beat” appearance. I would, by sound alone, diagnosis a pressure plate separating from the flywheel, due to abuse it would turn out, and something else that taught me how companies take the engineering and safety of their cars seriously.
While up on the lift, I discovered that the left rear HDPE or PP plastic left rear wheel well liner had melted about 50 to 75 mm away from the muffler. These cars had just come from Texas and had be flogged by the Press Corp.
At the time BMW used a “pink post card” reporting system for reporting problems and defects by Dealer Service Technicians in which, upon discovering a defect or problem, the Technician would fill out the card and send the postage paid card directly to BMW NA / BMW AG by the Postal Service.
I filled out my card and concluded my report by saying that, in my view, there was a possible fire hazard. I was confident in my diagnosis. I did very well studying Automotive Service in College. I and five other students beat out 100 or so semi-finalist to get into the program, Hey no problem.
About two weeks later one of my Instructors brought me the very same card I had filled out, mailed, and told me to fill it out again, exactly the same. Only this time I was to leave out the part of the wheel liner catching fire.
Why you may ask was I to leave out the catching fire part?
Well,
Diesel Addict would cry, “SEE, They don’t care! Cover up !”
Yet my comment about the wheel liner catching fire was speculation. I could not prove, nor did I know, why it happened. Plus, I lacked the expertise, experience and the resources to determine why that wheel liner next to the muffler melted, as other cars in our care had not.
In short, I was not qualified to speculate, nor was I responsible to correct such problems, but to report them. Engineers back in Germany had the responsibilities to correctly determine the cause and make any corrections through production design changes and / or their version of a TSB’s and related Dealer level services. In the end, what the Factory wants, is facts from the field, not speculation.
It was these two events, Audi’s North American problem with “Unintended Acceleration” and my experience with inner workings of BMW NA, and others, that taught me that the people who run these particular firms really do care about what they design, sell and service. That when it comes to the “real world” application and function of the cars they design and sell, it is only facts that matter.
So when the Volkswagen Group chose to publish a TSB or any document with a statement like this:
Service
[Note this is in a “box” with the European Attention triangle.]
Failure to use engine oil for your engine that expressly conforms to Volkswagen oil quality standard VW 505.01 can cause engine failure on the highway that can cause a crash and serious personal injury.
I have every faith that the folks at VW, SEAT, Skoda, and Audi do not take such statements lightly and run them by both the Engineers and the Lawyers before the such statements ever see a TSB and for good reason.
