I can tell there's a lot of job shop type experience here and a lot of that stuff does go on. The quality produced by the university system is not what it once was, for sure. I had a roommate once who was in many of my classes...knew how to study and get good grades (often better than me), but couldn't engineer his way out of a paper bag. Programmers have gotten lazy because they have so much hardware headroom that they can afford to be, and worst case if the screw up they just roll it and the 100 other bugs discovered that week into a patch that gets installed automatically the next Tuesday. There's no skin in the game and mediocrity is tolerated, even expected.
Having spent some years as a product and system design engineer in volume equipment manufacturing for a company that spent millions, if not billions modeling it's entire product design process after automotive manufacturers like Toyota, I can tell you automotive manufacturing exists in a completely different universe. They have this thing called warranty claims that can sink a project in a hurry, and if a real quality issue escapes they could have half a million or more problems out there before they even know about it. No single part makes it to launch without going through multiple reviews by cross functional teams or designers, mfg engineers, and "independent" reviewers not on the project to provide a critical eye outside of groupthink. And usually those are senior engineers that know a thing or two. A system like an engine would include multiple independent subject matter experts all the way up to the chief engineer at the company whose close to retirement and as salty as they come and won't hesitate to send a young design engineer out of a review meeting sobbing as they question every life choice that led up to that day.
So an engineer just screwing something up by a lack of fundamentals being the explanation for why gasoline tdi engines still haven't matched traditional gas engines in terms of maintenance and longevity is preposterous. They might let something small slip (like painting frames before the welds have cooled off enough), but when it comes to powertrain, they've put it through so much testing and data analysis that they know exactly what they're doing and putting out an engine that needs a timing chain every 80k miles or starts blowing itself up once the lowest-bidder sensors have drifted or the owner uses oil that isn't at the very latest API standard is DELIBERATE. They've had engineering, marketing, and finance all in a room together consciously making a decision that this balance is what's most profitable for the shareholders, because product cost, sale price, and expected warranty claims are balanced and optimized to paint the best possible picture on the next quarterly and annual reports. They've arrived at that conclusion based on a list of thousands of things that could go wrong, with each line understood, prioritized, and either addressed or deemed an acceptable risk. That's where most of the misses occur...not in design fundamentals but in miscalculating where the right balance is in whether a known issue needs to be solved or whether it will most often wait to show up until the warranty has expired.
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