"Ed Huntress" wrote in message
...
On Mon, 22 Sep 2014 09:19:28 -0400, "Jim Wilkins"
wrote:

....
Or, as they used to say at GM, "Any damned fool can design a
carburettor for a Rolls-Royce. It takes a genius to design one for a
Chevrolet."

Or the tongue-in-cheek motto applied to Mercedes-Benz: "Never use
two
parts to do a job when you can get away with three." g

--
Ed Huntress

The trouble with Chevy is they would order the tooling and test
station for that carb well in advance and then keep calling with "Oh,
by the way..." changes as they refined it.

We larded the test station for their 1970's analog ABS controller with
jumpers so they could change the test parameters themselves. While I
enjoyed flying first-class I didn't at all like Flint MI. For some
reason there weren't many passengers on those flights.

GM's project engineer was a Ph.D. from India with absolutely no
practical hands-on experience. He wanted the ramp-down curve of wheel
sensor speed accurate to 8 decimal places because that's what his
calculator gave him. No one had taught him that resistors have
tolerances.

Prior to emission controls the only electronic device in a car was the
radio, which they bought. The new electrical engineers they hired
faced a steep leaning curve to adapt to the contamination and
fighter-plane-like range of temperatures in an engine compartment.

-jsw