Earlier this week Chrysler talked about taking real steps to improve its quality. Today it’s GM. Mark Reuss, GM’s head of engineering, had this to say to the Detroit Free Press:
“Reliability has been the Achilles’ heel of GM for my entire career,” he said, promising he would focus the company’s engineers around the world on fixing the problem. “It gets down to an individual engineer’s ability to find a problem and leadership’s ability to fix it,” he said, adding that too many GM engineers have been reluctant to point out problems because they were afraid they’d get the blame rather than praise for catching the mistake before customers suffered.
It’s refrreshing to hear Reuss speaking so candidly. But such talk isn’t entirely new. Will the talk translate into action and results this time around? Unlike Chrysler, Reuss didn’t mention any concrete steps being taken to get there other than not firing people who bring up quality problems.
The reaction of some over at GMInsideNews: Reuss should be fired for mentioning GM’s quality problems.
Too many of GM’s recent launches have been rough. I see this in responses to TrueDelta’s Car Reliability Survey. For example, there seem to be some Lambda crossovers that are simply not fixable. On the other hand, the Malibu has been solid from the start.
TrueDelta’s results promptly update four times a year. So when GM does launch a solid product (or not), that information will often appear here first: