Episode Details

Evidence They Can’t Defend — Essay 10 of 13

Every vehicle launch has a signature failure, and on a modern car it is electrical.

Not the components. The components arrive working. What goes wrong is the connections — a harness seated proud instead of flush, an optical fibre nicked somewhere during the long violence of installing a vehicle’s insides. The part is fine. The joining of it is not. And the fault often presents nowhere near where it lives, so a customer finds it three months later in a driveway.

For the 2023 launch at Lansing Delta Township, the plan for preventing that had two parts, and I want to describe both precisely, because between them they explain the whole of this essay.

The first was training. Operators would learn the electrical work on a digital facsimile of the vehicle, in the trim shop — clicking on parts, clicking on points in an image of the car, clicking tools, completing sequences on a screen.

I thought then and think now that this is a classic formation error. There is no substitute for a master showing, instructing, observing, and certifying. Toyota has a word for the place where that happens: the dojo, a training area off the line where a new operator practises the actual work under a seasoned hand until someone competent signs off that they can do it to standard. Then they take a station. We had a screen with clickable parts.

I have watched that error take the same shape for thirty-six years. Somebody skips the formation, buys an instrument to catch what the formation would have prevented, and then defends the instrument long after it stops working. What follows is the cleanest example I have, and it cost a million dollars.

The second part was inspection. To stop cars leaving the trim shop with electrical faults, the plant installed about a million dollars of equipment that plugged into the vehicle’s electronics and verified circuit completion and function.

There was one problem, and it was mine. There was not enough cycle time for the test and not enough footprint to put it anywhere except at the end of the trim shop — which is to say, at my waypoint. I had thirty cars between me and chassis. Every blip on that tester ate into the bank, and if the bank emptied, chassis starved and I became Herbie: the constraint the whole plant is waiting on.

So watch what the million dollars actually bought. False alarms. Cycle-time problems from the equipment and from the inspectors operating it. And diagnosis time — because when the tester flagged a circuit, somebody still had to find out what was wrong with it, and finding out is slow.

Every one of those costs pointed back to the same place. Not to the tester. To the training that never happened: no dojo, no verified electrical skills, no repetitions on this particular vehicle under someone who could confirm the work was right.

And here is the ending, which is why I am telling you this in an essay about algorithms. Within about six months of ramp-up, the operators had accumulated enough repetitions to climb the learning curve on their own — the hard way, on live cars, without a dojo. The tester’s catch rate fell to almost nothing. It had become expensive and useless at the same time.

We disabled it. For good.

A million dollars of inspection technology, deployed as a substitute for formation, switched off six months later because the humans had finally learned what nobody had taught them.

That’s the argument. Every extraction mechanism in this series required a human decision. The gig economy automated the deciding — and what it automates, over and over, is the same swap I watched at LDT: a measurement system standing in for a formation system, priced as if it were cheaper, and defended long after it stops working.

Algorithmic wage suppression

Traditional wage suppression works through institutional mec