Most auto accidents don’t just happen. If you study what caused them it comes down to driver error, badly designed highways, sloppy workmanship or manufactures cutting too many corners when they design the cars.
I had a good friend that was an engineer for GM way back in 1974. I got to know him when I was working at a Chevy dealership. He brought his mother’s car in for some warranty work. He was telling me about how he was waiting for the weather to clear up so he could fly up to a small town in northern Michigan to try to fix a Chevy van that the dealer could not fix.
The complaint was every once in a while the driver would have to push real hard on the brakes to stop the truck. Dealers were replacing all kinds of brake parts trying to fix the problem without success. No one knew what was causing it.
A few weeks earlier I had a van come in with a complaint that every once in a while the motor would be racing when he came to a stop. I checked everything and could not find anything wrong; I could not duplicate the complaint so I gave the truck back.
The truck came back in about a week later with the same complaint and this time I got to talk to the owner. He told me the only time it happened was in the morning on his way to work when he got off the freeway.
We kept the truck overnight and the next morning I was able to duplicate the complaint. I remembered that when I had tried to come to a stop the motor was going so fast I had a hard time stopping.
I was able to figure out that someone at the factory had left a little tube out of the carburetor and the only time it effected anything was if you drove at highway speed on a day when the temperature was below 30 degrees.
The engineer called the dealer and told them what to do and the next day he called me to let me know that the part was missing and that he did not have to fly there to find out what was happening.
GM came out with a bulletin stating to check for the missing part if you had braking or fast idle complaints. Over the years I found that part missing on at least 5 other carburetors.
In any industry there has to be enough death or injury accidents to justify a recall.
How many accidents happened when people were trying to stop on icy roads with the motor racing which caused them to lose control of the vehicle? The trucks with the missing part should have been recalled.
Denver, 2013
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