Friday Fact – Cost Of Poor Quality

Did you know one of the biggest car manufacturers of the world had to recall 22,834 of its cars due to poor quality in the year 2018?
In the year 2018, the company issued a recall for 22,834 cars to fix the faulty front passenger airbag inflators. As a matter of fact, this was the 8^th recall for the cars that the company manufactured which contained the model of the cars from the previous generation which were manufactured in the year 3013.
The airbags inflator had the threat of being installed with intense internal pressure when activated. The airbag inflator casing might break which could have resulted in safety risk or injury to the vehicle occupants. Therefore, the company had to call all their cars back for replacing the defect in airbag inflator.
In the year 2017, the company had to recall 41,580 units of its car which were the previous models to correct the faulty air bags. In the year 2016, the company recalled 1,90,578 units of cars again with the previous generation of the model for rectifying the faulty airbags.
The reason for the company calling back the cars is because the third-party vendor who is in charge of manufacturing and fixing the airbags is working for other companies as well.
Hence not just this car manufacturing company but the other companies as well which were purchasing their airbags from the same 3^rd party vendor had to recall their cars to rectify the fault of the airbag inflator. In total, around 100 million cars were recalled by almost 13 auto manufacturers around the world.
This fault caused the death of at least 12 people and had injured almost 180 people for which the vendor for airbag inflator had to pay $1 billion as compensation.
Hence, as you can see that poor quality caused not just money to the company but a lifetime loss of the trust of its vendor. Quality shouldn’t be a point to be implemented at the time of manufacturing. It should be right from the source.
Till the date, we have seen how quality has made companies fall from the sky at the same time raise from the ground to touch the sky. In this case, we looked at how severe the cost of poor quality is? It can affect the lives of the customers.
There are companies where quality has created greater disaster which has not only cost them money but has brought the business to stop or closure. Understanding this paradigm, companies have started practicing and implementing quality at source – Right First Time. Have you started yet?
Compiled by Faber Priyal & Faber Mayuri