First rule of blowing the whistle: never disclose your identity if you can avoid it, even to authorities. There’s no upside to that and authorities are incompetent at preserving anonymity if it’s even legal for them to do so. (Exception: you’re filing a whistleblower report to the SEC, there’s sweet anonymous $$$ for you then.)
For some reason this has been downvoted, it seems some people on here think that whistleblowing is never about ego. I wouldn't be surprised if it was a factor most of the time.
This happened in the other SEC when a football player at an SEC school provided evidence that there were illegal benefits being provided to some of his teammates. The PDF report blacked out his name but was done in such a way that copying and pasting the redacted portion of the report showed his name in clear text.
Self-identifying yourself on Reddit and then posting classified company information in a childish tone would definitely get you blacklisted. If you read the post, it's clear that he didn't care about fixing the problems, he just wanted to dunk on the company for Reddit updoots.
I do find it wild he used his main account instead of a throwaway ranting about vinfast and communists (and still actively responding with account about how he won't suicide in thread about article). Seem's like clout chasing behavior but maybe he just doesn't give a shit.
That's your read. I read him as someone who did want to fix problems and was actively prevented from doing so for a long time, and has left that part of his career extremely frustrated as a result.
Yeah, maybe he could've been more professional. I guess. In my mind though the far more important takeaway is how a major automaker is (yet again) cutting corners and turning out ever shittier products at ever higher prices and pocketing the margins. And as someone who is actually looking into a vehicle in similar categories, if I could get an engineer like him from every manufacturer to give me the non-corporate-speak truth of what goes on in their design process, that would be 1000x more valuable than all the samey-bullshit-marketing-fluff that all of them turn out.
And you know, if the company itself was more interested in making a quality product than just telling people their product is quality they probably wouldn't give half a shit if an engineer was out discussing the process. I get that NDAs are most often (and for!) protecting a company's IP, and that makes good and is sense. However the same agreements also allow said company to do all kinds of horseshit with at least a decent expectation that their engineers won't spill the beans to the wider public, and that sucks ass.
Way too extreme. Seeing the world in such manicheanist terms is not healthy.
All companies care about safety, to varying degrees and for a mix of reasons ranging from PR to regulatory burden to the fact the CEO uses the product.
Many don’t care enough by my subjective standards, but it’s silly and childish to say no company cares even the tiniest bit about safety in any context.
> In 1949, Wisconsin-based Nash Motors became the first car company to offer them as an additional feature. Almost no one asked for them. In 1968, when seat belts became standard equipment, some drivers responded by cutting them out of their vehicles. In 1982, when Michigan State Rep. David Hollister introduced a state seat belt law, he received hate mail comparing him to Hitler. The reception to such laws in other states was similarly cool. In the 1980s, only 14% of all Americans used seat belts.
yes, all companies care about safety...after profits
we've structured corporations that this is the main driver, full stop.
as an example, earlier in my career i worked in aviation test equipment. for commercial and govt't agencies. let's just say i avoid flying anywhere at all costs now if i can. why? because, as always, safety is secondary to profits (and most of the time, you hope it is secondary and not ternary or worse). and this was in a 'highly regulated' industry.
I think Volvo is a good example for why most companies don't care about safety any more than the law and basic PR requires: the market does not reward companies that try to use safety as a selling point. Volvo is the only major car company that consistently manufactures cars that widely exceed legal safety requirements, but have a global market share of less than half a percent.
That's probably about the number of people who take safety into consideration as a major factor when making purchasing decisions.
You are wrong about cars. There are many automakers who absolutely care about safety, particularly in Germany, where even the slightest possibility of safety concerns can end an initiative.
Launch fast, ignore obvious things. I see it daily: „just ship products, we finish them when they come for repairs“. Scary new world, nobody is really responsible for this. The workers do not stay long. As well as managers.
I recall a discussion here about the decline in software quality, from many years ago. Someone argued that if we designed hardware the way we design software, we'd be too afraid to go outside. At the time, I thought it was just hyperbole...
It's still clearly an exaggeration, but one could argue that reality is gradually moving in that direction.
My take on this that's more to do with increase in software complexity and "quarterly thinking" than "people just don't care." As an embedded engineer I don't get much to say except maybe sprint to sprint unless I start my own company.
> I recall a discussion here about the decline in software quality, from many years ago. Someone argued that if we designed hardware the way we design software, we'd be too afraid to go outside. At the time, I thought it was just hyperbole...
My director pushes production guys really hard. They sometimes close an eye and ship a bit faulty product. No screws on heatspreader or wrong thermal pad. And here you go, these things do not last long. But in the books revenue was made in that year. Repairs will come later as separate expense.
Lead paint on children's toys and asbestos in the walls suggest there has never been a culture of making sure it is safe before putting it in production even in the physical world.
But asbestos in the walls is great for the safety of those living there — the place doesn't burn down so easily. It's the safety of anyone who inhales the dust when the place gets broken down that's endangered by asbestos.
> AI-powered Talent Matching: Leverage AI to identify and match top talent across blue collar and white collar roles from a broad range of sources including contingent workers, freelancers, and project-based workers.
GDPR may have technically replaced the right to be forgotten with a more limited right of erasure, but unless you care about legal phrasing it's an easy thing to mix up.
Also, it does look like a GDPR issue to me — not that I'm a lawyer, so usual caveat applies, all I can do is look at the plain language of GDPR on the Commission website.
GDPR regulates "personal data" (information that relates to an identified or identifiable individual), and looking at the "lawful purposes" list in Article 6, people running such a thing would seem to me to need to make some kind of argument about "legitimate interests" or "performance of a contract".
It may be that a plain reading of this isn't giving me the correct answer, but I don't see how placing specifically whistleblowers (rather than, say, known embezzlers) on a blacklist would meet the standards: https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/data-protection/r...
The weird thing for me here is why it is relevant that it's an electric car, at the end of the day the failure was with the engineering of the suspension, nothing to do with the way that it is powered. This could have happened with any vehicle, this article seems to be click baiting on the fact that the model was an EV.
Electric vehicles are very heavy, which means a lot of mechanical stress for the suspension. And any rate, if a particular EV model was what's affected, why not specify that?
Even if it is a skateboard, it is still heavier than a non-electric skateboard. As GP said, electric vehicles are very heavy. My electric bike weighs considerably more than non-electric bikes, our electric scooters weigh more than kick scooters, and parent is being contrarian for the sake of being contrarian.
A Mitsubishi I-MiEV at 2268 LB (3329 LB GVWR - 661 LB vehicle capacity weight) isn't a ton lighter than a Ford Mustang, but it's on the lighter side for an EV.
Same reason phone headlines always mention branding when they're iPhones: more people click on headlines like that. In this case one could argue that it's relevant because no ICE models had this flaw, but I'm not convinced this wasn't done to make money off the EV/anti-EV flame wars that are happening online every day.
Nice self-own by Tata. Guy blows whistle while working at their obscure VinFast brand, but they sack him once he's moved to work for Jaguar - so all the headlines are about JLR rather than VinFast...
Trying to make cheap non-electrical vehicles makes sense, because it's mainstream and has been for a long time. A cheap brand would make a car like the ones we had 5 years ago, which are safe. A kind of random number, but you get the idea.
I've always viewed EVs as a luxury.
While it's interesting to experiment with cheap EV designs, the short or midterm goal shouldn't be production.
There's a reason Tesla sells its cars even though they are expensive. They're supposed to be expensive since they are basically high-scale experiment.
Jaguar and Land [Range] Rover are notorious for their electrical problems. I wouldn't trust an ICE vehicle from them let alone an EV. I doubt that even with new ownership or investment (or whatever is going on here) they can overcome the culture of unreliability and poor quality that has been built over a century.
As a car guy I heard about the whole VinFast saga a few months ago. It was kinda shocking because just about every car Youtuber that got a chance to review the VinFast shat all over it. Apparently after a while they pulled all review cars and eventually let more reviewers access them after they sorted them out. But IIRC even after that, reviewers of the "sorted" cards noted that their were still issues and they all seemed to be getting the same set of "sorted" cards which indicates the ones on the lot were probably still dogshit.
Reading the reddit thread it reeks of fresh out of school MEs making the wrong assumptions and implicit value judgments when weighing tradeoffs because it's what they're familiar with and school does a really great job indoctrinating them to pursue performance on first order metrics (e.g. weight) the detriment of secondary or "not even mentioned but implied" metrics (failure mode, serviceability, tooling costs, etc) and a lack of senior people like the whistleblower to call them on it.
While I sympathize with the complaints about budget and time that kind of further reinforces my point. In the face of those constraints experienced engineers would have designed something conservative with room for improvement. It's new engineers who more frequently tend to over-optimize design something right up to within an inch of its life when faced with tight constraints.
A lot of stuff that is perfectly possible to do "safely" is only possible if your head is full of a decade of experience and familiarity with the real world successful solutions to similar problems. People with that knowledge and in an environment were other corners are being cut tend to produce designs that have room for minor revision by other parties as well as corner cutting (i.e. the testing guys pencil whip it) while still actually working well in reality, though perhaps leaving some performance in key areas on the table.
If you are fresh out of school and your head is full of ancient knowledge that is in the textbooks and lessons and tidbits of "the new hotness" and you are too reliant on simulation, testing, and other process that is done for process sake in school you are likely to design something that leaves less potential performance in measured areas (weight, cost, etc) but has lot of teething issues on secondary or unmeasured criteria (i.e. the tool and die guys will hate you, your item will wear rapidly in a case that while not average, represents a large number of users, etc)
Look at Juicero. It hit the key points, it juiced things, but it was wildly expensive and a bear to manufacture and operating costs were comical because there were no adults in the room to tell the noobs that their weighting of the tradeoffs both expressed and implied wasn't quit right. Here the same sort of inexperienced people were told to produce a suspension befitting a sexy new EV but also to make it cheap. Well they did that, but they also made something that's coming apart at the seams from day 1 and doesn't age gracefully at all and in cases of extreme use results in spectacular failures.
You see this sort of pattern in all sorts of technical fields.
Jaguar was historically known for terrible quality control, right? When I was young, the joke was that you had to own two; one to use while the other was in the shop...
Yeah "once great" is definitely a huge exaggeration. They're terribly unreliable. In the 90s we had one Jag in the neighborhood I lived in and it never moved lol. Everyone knew they were junk even back then.
How it usually went (not sure about now, but certainly 10 years ago): Dodge < Jaguar/Landrover < Germans cars < American cars < Japanese cars
Is there any society on the planet that isn't fundamentally corrupt at this point? We put whistleblower protection on the books and they punish those who step forward. It's just disgraceful.
First rule of blowing the whistle: never disclose your identity if you can avoid it, even to authorities. There’s no upside to that and authorities are incompetent at preserving anonymity if it’s even legal for them to do so. (Exception: you’re filing a whistleblower report to the SEC, there’s sweet anonymous $$$ for you then.)
But what about the ego? Any virtuous act might be fueled by the expectation of recognition.
For some reason this has been downvoted, it seems some people on here think that whistleblowing is never about ego. I wouldn't be surprised if it was a factor most of the time.
So if the name is disclosed it‘s ego and if the source stays anonymous it’s not trustworthy.
Got it.
Didn't say that. Didn't say anything close to that. Not to mention you can be trustworthy and still do something for self-serving purposes.
This happened in the other SEC when a football player at an SEC school provided evidence that there were illegal benefits being provided to some of his teammates. The PDF report blacked out his name but was done in such a way that copying and pasting the redacted portion of the report showed his name in clear text.
https://www.reddit.com/r/VinFastCommunity/comments/1d3be8z/i...
Self-identifying yourself on Reddit and then posting classified company information in a childish tone would definitely get you blacklisted. If you read the post, it's clear that he didn't care about fixing the problems, he just wanted to dunk on the company for Reddit updoots.
I do find it wild he used his main account instead of a throwaway ranting about vinfast and communists (and still actively responding with account about how he won't suicide in thread about article). Seem's like clout chasing behavior but maybe he just doesn't give a shit.
The fact that there is a process to blacklist someone at all points to a serious problem in society.
Does the fact that he blew the whistle infer that he cared about the problems?
What would you have done if you realised that something you're working on was a death-trap, and managed ignored your concerns?
*imply
how you feel about this depends if you're a means or an ends guy
That's your read. I read him as someone who did want to fix problems and was actively prevented from doing so for a long time, and has left that part of his career extremely frustrated as a result.
Yeah, maybe he could've been more professional. I guess. In my mind though the far more important takeaway is how a major automaker is (yet again) cutting corners and turning out ever shittier products at ever higher prices and pocketing the margins. And as someone who is actually looking into a vehicle in similar categories, if I could get an engineer like him from every manufacturer to give me the non-corporate-speak truth of what goes on in their design process, that would be 1000x more valuable than all the samey-bullshit-marketing-fluff that all of them turn out.
And you know, if the company itself was more interested in making a quality product than just telling people their product is quality they probably wouldn't give half a shit if an engineer was out discussing the process. I get that NDAs are most often (and for!) protecting a company's IP, and that makes good and is sense. However the same agreements also allow said company to do all kinds of horseshit with at least a decent expectation that their engineers won't spill the beans to the wider public, and that sucks ass.
Well that was wild. An industry wide recruiting blacklist sounds terrible.
Key takeaways here are probably "Vinfast doesn't have much in house engineering" and "don't buy one right now".
The key takeaway is that Tata Group doesn't care about safety at all.
True. Nor does any other manufacturer of cars nor toys nor paint nor cosmetics nor AI software nor canned foods....
Consumers and victims care about safety. Regulation is the only reason safety exists.
Way too extreme. Seeing the world in such manicheanist terms is not healthy.
All companies care about safety, to varying degrees and for a mix of reasons ranging from PR to regulatory burden to the fact the CEO uses the product.
Many don’t care enough by my subjective standards, but it’s silly and childish to say no company cares even the tiniest bit about safety in any context.
> In 1949, Wisconsin-based Nash Motors became the first car company to offer them as an additional feature. Almost no one asked for them. In 1968, when seat belts became standard equipment, some drivers responded by cutting them out of their vehicles. In 1982, when Michigan State Rep. David Hollister introduced a state seat belt law, he received hate mail comparing him to Hitler. The reception to such laws in other states was similarly cool. In the 1980s, only 14% of all Americans used seat belts.
https://www.the-rheumatologist.org/article/revisionist-histo...
So, yeah, without the law there's no seatbelt on your car.
i'm sorry but
> All companies care about safety
is naive at best.
yes, all companies care about safety...after profits
we've structured corporations that this is the main driver, full stop.
as an example, earlier in my career i worked in aviation test equipment. for commercial and govt't agencies. let's just say i avoid flying anywhere at all costs now if i can. why? because, as always, safety is secondary to profits (and most of the time, you hope it is secondary and not ternary or worse). and this was in a 'highly regulated' industry.
Lucid and Volvo both care very much about safety. Safety is core to both their brands, and part of what they’ve built them on.
Volvo in the past absolutely cared, future Volvo it's still unknown(they have a new owner and their position is unknown last I checked).
Volvo is majority-owned by Geely, a car brand that is definitely not known for safety.
I think Volvo is a good example for why most companies don't care about safety any more than the law and basic PR requires: the market does not reward companies that try to use safety as a selling point. Volvo is the only major car company that consistently manufactures cars that widely exceed legal safety requirements, but have a global market share of less than half a percent.
That's probably about the number of people who take safety into consideration as a major factor when making purchasing decisions.
Thats a bit weird take given that safety standards are increasing year on year.
Crash tests from 2000 are way stricter today.
So they all force the manufactures to fight for 5 stars
You are wrong about cars. There are many automakers who absolutely care about safety, particularly in Germany, where even the slightest possibility of safety concerns can end an initiative.
Not everyone is following the China model.
that's why we have regulations and bureaucracies like NHTSA to report to. Probably better than reporting on reddit I would guess.
It’s all about economics. Just apply the formula: https://youtu.be/SiB8GVMNJkE
(May not be SFW depending on where you work)
Who cares actually? Nobody. See initial Tesla problem with wheels falling off: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/us-age...
Launch fast, ignore obvious things. I see it daily: „just ship products, we finish them when they come for repairs“. Scary new world, nobody is really responsible for this. The workers do not stay long. As well as managers.
I recall a discussion here about the decline in software quality, from many years ago. Someone argued that if we designed hardware the way we design software, we'd be too afraid to go outside. At the time, I thought it was just hyperbole...
It's still clearly an exaggeration, but one could argue that reality is gradually moving in that direction.
My take on this that's more to do with increase in software complexity and "quarterly thinking" than "people just don't care." As an embedded engineer I don't get much to say except maybe sprint to sprint unless I start my own company.
> I recall a discussion here about the decline in software quality, from many years ago. Someone argued that if we designed hardware the way we design software, we'd be too afraid to go outside. At the time, I thought it was just hyperbole...
That meme goes back at least to the 90s: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/car-balk/
My director pushes production guys really hard. They sometimes close an eye and ship a bit faulty product. No screws on heatspreader or wrong thermal pad. And here you go, these things do not last long. But in the books revenue was made in that year. Repairs will come later as separate expense.
>gradually moving in that direction
Lead paint on children's toys and asbestos in the walls suggest there has never been a culture of making sure it is safe before putting it in production even in the physical world.
Lead pipes, yes.
But asbestos in the walls is great for the safety of those living there — the place doesn't burn down so easily. It's the safety of anyone who inhales the dust when the place gets broken down that's endangered by asbestos.
> Who cares actually? Nobody.
I do. Speaking only for myself, but Tesla has a long long way to go to repair its manufacturing reputation in my eyes.
Volvo has their own safety center.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=wOJrhNCsPL4
Tesla and Tata are both famously worse than the rest of the industry, though.
Tesla is, by far, the most egregious representative of this. Tata is second.
Plenty of companies do care. These two don’t.
Or at least blacklisted from that platform they use for recruitment?
https://magnitglobal.com/us/en/workforce-management-platform...
> AI-powered Talent Matching: Leverage AI to identify and match top talent across blue collar and white collar roles from a broad range of sources including contingent workers, freelancers, and project-based workers.
Is that even legal in the UK?
I wonder how an industry wide blacklist complies with GDPR right to be forgotten.
Oh wait, it doesn't, but because it's not a tech company it gets a free pass.
You are being downvoted because you fail to understand the basic tenants of the GDPR.
Choosing to remain ignorant of such important legislation is ridiculous.
Disagree, I think it's more about the snark.
GDPR may have technically replaced the right to be forgotten with a more limited right of erasure, but unless you care about legal phrasing it's an easy thing to mix up.
Also, it does look like a GDPR issue to me — not that I'm a lawyer, so usual caveat applies, all I can do is look at the plain language of GDPR on the Commission website.
GDPR regulates "personal data" (information that relates to an identified or identifiable individual), and looking at the "lawful purposes" list in Article 6, people running such a thing would seem to me to need to make some kind of argument about "legitimate interests" or "performance of a contract".
It may be that a plain reading of this isn't giving me the correct answer, but I don't see how placing specifically whistleblowers (rather than, say, known embezzlers) on a blacklist would meet the standards: https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/data-protection/r...
>> because you fail to understand the basic tenants of the GDPR
Hi! In the spirit of improving communication and assuming that you'd like to know:
A tenant is someone who rents a property
A tenet is a principle or belief that is generally considered to be true
Thanks to the brave person who was willing to speak out in the face of retaliation.
People like this are heroic and are essential to keeping unscrupulous bureaucrats in check.
Hopefully he gets paid in court.
The weird thing for me here is why it is relevant that it's an electric car, at the end of the day the failure was with the engineering of the suspension, nothing to do with the way that it is powered. This could have happened with any vehicle, this article seems to be click baiting on the fact that the model was an EV.
Electric vehicles are very heavy, which means a lot of mechanical stress for the suspension. And any rate, if a particular EV model was what's affected, why not specify that?
>> Electric vehicles are very heavy, which means a lot of mechanical stress for the suspension
Not necessarily - as an example:
Tesla Model 3 Standard: 3,862 lbs (1755 kg)
Tesla Model 3 Long Range: 4,034 lbs (1834 kg)
Tesla Model 3 Performance: 4,054 lbs (1843 kg)
BMW M3: 3,990 lbs (1814 kg)
These are effectively the same weight for comparably-positioned sports sedans.
I'm not sure about that, my electric vehicle weighs about a ton less than a Mustang.
Is it a skateboard? Mustangs aren't even 2 tons.
An ~1800-lb limit, to be a ton less than a mustang, doesn't give you much room to make a full-size vehicle. A prius is over 3,000 lbs.
Even if it is a skateboard, it is still heavier than a non-electric skateboard. As GP said, electric vehicles are very heavy. My electric bike weighs considerably more than non-electric bikes, our electric scooters weigh more than kick scooters, and parent is being contrarian for the sake of being contrarian.
Quibble: Electric vehicle weight is compared to the ICE alternatives. You’re comparing electric vehicles to things without motors at all
https://www.cjponyparts.com/resources/mustang-curb-weights
2024 Mustang curb weight is 3588 - 3949 lbs.
So you're suggesting you drive an EV that weighs approximately 1588 - 1949 lbs. Which EV is that?
https://www.topspeed.com/lightest-electric-cars/
At least in the U.S., the lightest EV starts at 2952 lbs (Fiat 500e).
https://www.topspeed.com/cars/car-news/at-1627-pounds-the-va...
There is at least one EV that is light enough, though I suspect it is not your daily driver.
Not OP, but also not US.
The Dacia Spring is available around here (Berlin), and while it's a bit more than that mass, it's close enough to be "about" a ton lighter.
Then your electric car is exceptional. A mustang weighs about 3,600 pounds. Which is heavy to be sure.
But lighter than almost all electric cars. Certainly not a ton heavier.
Tesla model 3: 3900 pounds Tesla model S: 4700 pounds Chevy bolt: 3600 pounds Nissan Leaf: 3900 pounds Volkswagen ID4: 4600 pounds
EVs are heavy. I’d be interested in your 2600 pound EV.
A Mitsubishi I-MiEV at 2268 LB (3329 LB GVWR - 661 LB vehicle capacity weight) isn't a ton lighter than a Ford Mustang, but it's on the lighter side for an EV.
Source: my I-MiEV owner's manual
2024 Toyota Camry - 3595lbs
So is the mustang heavy? Compared to what?
Same reason phone headlines always mention branding when they're iPhones: more people click on headlines like that. In this case one could argue that it's relevant because no ICE models had this flaw, but I'm not convinced this wasn't done to make money off the EV/anti-EV flame wars that are happening online every day.
Nice self-own by Tata. Guy blows whistle while working at their obscure VinFast brand, but they sack him once he's moved to work for Jaguar - so all the headlines are about JLR rather than VinFast...
Trying to make cheap non-electrical vehicles makes sense, because it's mainstream and has been for a long time. A cheap brand would make a car like the ones we had 5 years ago, which are safe. A kind of random number, but you get the idea.
I've always viewed EVs as a luxury. While it's interesting to experiment with cheap EV designs, the short or midterm goal shouldn't be production.
There's a reason Tesla sells its cars even though they are expensive. They're supposed to be expensive since they are basically high-scale experiment.
Useful interview pattern for candidates:
Candidate: Is this a newly created roll?
Company: No.
Candidate: <breezily> What did the last guy die of?
You'd be surprised how few interviewers are able to lie fast enough and convincingly enough.
Small nit: they call it Jaguar Land Rover electric car, but everything seems to be about Vinfast a completely different company?
Vinfast is acting as a Tier 1 for Jaguar, designing parts of the front chassis. This guy was on one of the engineering teams.
> posting concerns on Reddit
He started commenting after NHTSA was already on the case. He was commenting the investigation where VinFast was cooperating.
It would be better to report to media, regulators or, relevant hedge fund who could start shorting.
Jaguar and Land [Range] Rover are notorious for their electrical problems. I wouldn't trust an ICE vehicle from them let alone an EV. I doubt that even with new ownership or investment (or whatever is going on here) they can overcome the culture of unreliability and poor quality that has been built over a century.
As a car guy I heard about the whole VinFast saga a few months ago. It was kinda shocking because just about every car Youtuber that got a chance to review the VinFast shat all over it. Apparently after a while they pulled all review cars and eventually let more reviewers access them after they sorted them out. But IIRC even after that, reviewers of the "sorted" cards noted that their were still issues and they all seemed to be getting the same set of "sorted" cards which indicates the ones on the lot were probably still dogshit.
Reading the reddit thread it reeks of fresh out of school MEs making the wrong assumptions and implicit value judgments when weighing tradeoffs because it's what they're familiar with and school does a really great job indoctrinating them to pursue performance on first order metrics (e.g. weight) the detriment of secondary or "not even mentioned but implied" metrics (failure mode, serviceability, tooling costs, etc) and a lack of senior people like the whistleblower to call them on it.
While I sympathize with the complaints about budget and time that kind of further reinforces my point. In the face of those constraints experienced engineers would have designed something conservative with room for improvement. It's new engineers who more frequently tend to over-optimize design something right up to within an inch of its life when faced with tight constraints.
From the article
> He soon became concerned VinFast was cutting corners with safety, keeping costs down by employing a small team of inexperienced engineers.
> His concerns grew when he heard three of his predecessors had quit after short spells on the project.
This to me sounds like the boss issued a task that was impossible to do safely and fired anyone who splashed reality into the mix.
A lot of stuff that is perfectly possible to do "safely" is only possible if your head is full of a decade of experience and familiarity with the real world successful solutions to similar problems. People with that knowledge and in an environment were other corners are being cut tend to produce designs that have room for minor revision by other parties as well as corner cutting (i.e. the testing guys pencil whip it) while still actually working well in reality, though perhaps leaving some performance in key areas on the table.
If you are fresh out of school and your head is full of ancient knowledge that is in the textbooks and lessons and tidbits of "the new hotness" and you are too reliant on simulation, testing, and other process that is done for process sake in school you are likely to design something that leaves less potential performance in measured areas (weight, cost, etc) but has lot of teething issues on secondary or unmeasured criteria (i.e. the tool and die guys will hate you, your item will wear rapidly in a case that while not average, represents a large number of users, etc)
Look at Juicero. It hit the key points, it juiced things, but it was wildly expensive and a bear to manufacture and operating costs were comical because there were no adults in the room to tell the noobs that their weighting of the tradeoffs both expressed and implied wasn't quit right. Here the same sort of inexperienced people were told to produce a suspension befitting a sexy new EV but also to make it cheap. Well they did that, but they also made something that's coming apart at the seams from day 1 and doesn't age gracefully at all and in cases of extreme use results in spectacular failures.
You see this sort of pattern in all sorts of technical fields.
Sad to see what's happened to a once great, once British, brand.
Jaguar was historically known for terrible quality control, right? When I was young, the joke was that you had to own two; one to use while the other was in the shop...
Yeah "once great" is definitely a huge exaggeration. They're terribly unreliable. In the 90s we had one Jag in the neighborhood I lived in and it never moved lol. Everyone knew they were junk even back then.
How it usually went (not sure about now, but certainly 10 years ago): Dodge < Jaguar/Landrover < Germans cars < American cars < Japanese cars
> once British
All of its senior executive leadership is still British
https://www.jaguarlandrover.com/leadership
All of its senior executive leadership is still British
Obviously not true.
One of them is German.
As British as the British Royal Family then https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Windsor
Even better then.
Both speak Germanic languages, close enough?
Is there any society on the planet that isn't fundamentally corrupt at this point? We put whistleblower protection on the books and they punish those who step forward. It's just disgraceful.
At this point? Do you think corruption is increasing compared to 100 years ago, globally?