Detroit Recalls a Recall

FOR all its vaunted management talent and technological capability, the auto industry is having increasing trouble building cars that can hold together. As a result, the industry in the past five months has recalled more cars (more than 7,000,000) than it has sold. The biggest recall to date involved 6.7 million 1965 to 1969 Chevrolets that have possibly defective motor mounts; engines on some have twisted loose from the car frames.

The strangest recall is the one that Ford announced last week involving 436,000 1972 Torinos and Montegos. In 16 cases the rear axles and wheels actually came off these new cars. Ford will bring each car back twice--the first time to install a retainer plate on the rear axle to hold it in place; the second time to replace the whole axle with a heavier one.

Ford was forced into this odd procedure by a budding driver rebellion against recalls that look to critics like mere patch-up jobs. Two weeks ago, Ford executives decided only to install an inexpensive retainer plate on a rear hub of each car. The plate is designed to increase the screeching noise that occurs when an axle starts to come loose, so that the driver cannot help noticing it, and to hold the axle in place for at least 100 miles, so that the driver has time to reach a garage. In doing no more than that, the company would have been following ample precedent. G.M., for example, will replace only a few of the defective Chevy motor mounts with new ones that cost $30 each. Instead, it in effect will strap in most engines by installing wire "restraints" that cost only $5 each.

Ford executives insist that installing only a retainer plate would have assured driver safety. Drivers feared otherwise --particularly after they learned that Ford intends to put heavier axles on new Torinos and Montegos coming off the assembly line. By the beginning of last week, the Detroit Free Press was denouncing the decision to install only retainer plates as a "corporate cop-out," and Ford dealers had received more than 1,000 complaints and inquiries from customers demanding that the axles be replaced.

So Ford men decided, with the approval of Henry Ford II, to recall the recall: they will complete the first recall and install the retainer plates to give drivers immediate protection, and then bring each car back again for axle replacement. This procedure will raise the total cost of the recall to about $30 million from an originally estimated $5,000,000, but that could be a small price for averting the sales slump that might be caused by safety fears. Last year Ford had to recall 220,000 Pintos after receiving reports that flash fires had occurred in the air filters of 100 of them, and when news of the trouble got out. Pinto sales briefly dropped 25% .

The second recall may allay motorists' fears, but it hardly answers the question of how the industry manages to produce cars with such defects as engines that twist loose and wheel-axle assemblies that come off. Automakers' explanations are anything but reassuring. They maintain that such flaws result not from sloppy workmanship or careless quality control but bad engineering decisions. In effect, the faults are designed into the cars--unintentionally to be sure --by engineers making the wrong compromises between safety, cost and speed considerations. In the current case, Ford redesigned its 1972 Torinos and Montegos, making them heavier for the sake of a smoother ride, yet engineers thought that they could safely hold down costs by using the same axle as the one that went onto the 1971s. Richard Judy, public relations manager for consumer services, admits: "Maybe all factors were not given careful consideration."

The industry's test-driving procedures also seem inadequate. Ford men now suspect that several axle failures resulted from cars being driven in the Northeast over roads that had been sprinkled with salt to melt ice and snow. The salt, they think, got into a bearing that holds the rear axle together and caused it to deteriorate. Somehow that possibility was not considered in all the 19 million miles of test driving that Ford puts its new cars through each year. Automen insist that they cannot duplicate in road tests every condition that may come up in actual driving; that contention is no doubt correct, but it is hardly an excuse. Quite obviously, a large percentage of cars every year will be bought by people who live in the Northeast and must occasionally drive over salty roads.

Ford now is analyzing why its tests failed to reveal the axle defect, with an eye toward possibly revising the test procedures. Motorists can only hope that there is a revision, and that G.M. will follow suit. The annoyance that drivers now feel about recalls will hardly compare with their emotions if they get the idea that they must do a good deal of the test driving on new cars themselves.

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