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"I chose your firm because everyone I spoke to said you are known as the authorities on California Lemon Law. The service you provide reflects this."
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What is a Lemon Car?
Check to see if any of these options apply to your car.
If they do, you may have a case:
- rough idle
- transmission
- rough shifting
- stalling
- check engine light on
- vehicle surges
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 Lemon Law Wins
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Precedent Setting Lemon Law Wins
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VARIATION: THE REAL REASON
THE LEMON VEHICLE, A STATISTICAL CERTAINTY
Variation in art, music and romance is a good thing. In these things one can be extravagant without fear of criticism. Excess variation in manufacturing however, is a bad, bad thing indeed. During the past four years, approximately 60,000,000 new cars were sold in the United States. Conservatively 1% of them are lemons by definition: 5% certainly wouldn’t be out of the question. Some studies suggest that the percentage of lemon vehicles on the road is higher. I use the 4-year production number because the average new car warranty is roughly 4-years – 50,000 miles.
Figure 1 World Wide Car & Truck Production
Lemon law statutes define a lemon as a vehicle in which the defective condition substantially reduces the use, value or safety of the vehicle. In a lemon vehicle, the defect is the key. A defect is something a vehicle does (pulls to the left when braking) or does not do (won’t start in the morning) that falls below the standard set forth in the warranty.
It isn’t that some manufacturer is never going to produce a lemon. That idea is statistically ridiculous, unless, perhaps, they are only making five vehicles a year. The proper question is, how many are made? The real problem is producing the smallest possible number of lemon vehicles.
It’s in the Numbers
Of the 10,000 to 15,000 parts in the modern automobile, some percentage of them is connected to one or more other parts, which then form assemblies of parts. Some of these parts are moving, and some are stationary. Some of these parts have a common purpose or function. Examples of such assemblies might be the engine, the suspension, the transmission/differential, electronic controls and on and on.
What happens if the manufacturer bolts, welds, or electrically connects two or more parts or assemblies that were not designed correctly or manufactured to the correct specifications? How far out of specification is the assembly that contains the defective component? It’s in the math and the math absolutely predicts defects, and many of them. Where enough connected parts are out of specification, we have excessive wear. This is where the rattles come from, and host of other ills.
In one of my earlier incarnations I taught Statistical Process Control (SPC) and Total Quality management (TQM) to numerous manufacturing companies around southern California. SPC is a statistical method used to measure, understand and control variation in manufacturing and other business processes. Uncontrolled variation is what determines whether one or more of those 10,000 to 15,000 parts fails to meet its specifications.
Figure 2. A Diagram of Variation in Manufacturing
This having been said, I feel confident in approaching the numerical reasons why there are so many defective automobiles, RVs, boats and motorcycles on the highways and byways of America. In other articles I have discussed the financial and ethical (executive arrogance, greed and indifference) reasons that define why there are so many lemons on the road today. This article addresses the physical and procedural aspects of manufacturing.
Lets see if we can understand why your new Ford, Chevy or Mercedes spends more time in the shop than a Russian refrigerator. One percent of 60,000,000 cars equal 600,000 lemons. By the way, mathematics is indifferent to which manufacturer made the vehicle. There is no need for name calling here. Every manufacturer produces lemons. Some manufacturers, however, are much worse than others.
This is not exact, but sufficient to the point of the article. If we thought the 1% was actually 5%, then that would be 3,000,000 lemons on the road. So what is the point here? Regardless of the percentage of lemons determined to be on the road by the various studies, there’s an awful lot of them.
At the heart of this tale of woe is one word, and that word is, variation. If you manufacture anything, variation, excess variation, variation outside of specifications, is the enemy. If you have a process to assemble things, excess variation in the process can produce lemons.
If you manufactured a million metal bricks with a milling machine, how accurate would the machine have to be to produce sufficient accuracy that only 3 or 4 of the bricks manufactured were out side of specification? The ability to handle tight tolerances in machine tools drives up the expense of the machines astronomically.
As we have seen, machine tools and materials vary. Is the metal uniform? Was the machine set up properly? Is the part of the tool that cuts sharp enough? Is it hard enough? How quickly does the tool wear? A machine tool that could machine engine pistons to a tolerance where only 3 parts in a million were outside the specification center would cost millions of dollars.
In the early days of manufacturing large airplanes, the actual length of the aircraft could often be as much as 10 feet longer than the design length. Why? Because the cumulative affect of the variations on the size of the pieces added together took the length way out of specification. The same thing can happen in an automobile. When tolerances of the parts in the vehicle add, you get transmissions that don’t shift properly. You get doors and windows that rattle and a host of other problems.
What’s the bottom line here? How does the manufacturer solve the problem? The manufacturer widens the tolerances. Quality standards are lowered. Despite advertisements where some demented, drug dented rock star is screaming about “Ford Tough” or the “Ultimate Driving Machine”, quality for many manufacturers is not as important as pumping out more iron.
Why do you suppose manufacturers love robots? Robots will do the same thing over and over, exactly the same way. Robots don’t go on strike. They don’t look at the pretty woman with the short skirt from production control. They don’t lose interest because it’s Friday and they are thinking about going to the lake. They simply don’t have bad and good days. As long as they are well maintained and fed the proper materials, they spit out good products. But robots are subject to many of the variations shown in Figure 2.
While Norman Taylor & Associates and other lemon law firms handle thousands of lemon law cases every year, we known we are only removing a scab from a deep wound that just won’t heal.
We may choose to look at the problem as “the cup half full or the cup half empty.” The positive viewpoint is that it is amazing that given all variations in the manufacturing process, so many good vehicles are built every year.
For the person driving a lemon vehicle whose engine dies every time he slows for a stop sign, the cup is a lot more than half empty, and understandably so.
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Presumption and the Lemon Law