Rear brake squeal on the 08's................. The dealers are right again when they say "They all do it." It's so wonderful when one line like that is a way to get forgivness for poor designs. As long as they all do it, there isn't anything they can/will do to attempt a repair. What a plan!!!!!!!!
And the best part is, by refusing to do anything because "they all do it", there is no official record of the problem and the MoCo can claim ignorance of the entire situation. I hope that everyone who has this squeal issue calls the MoCo direct and gets it on record, even if you wind up having to fix it yourself.
Funny thing about stuff like this, when companies don't believe they have any real competition they tend to act a lot like the MoCo and their dealers. However, let business go to hell and the competition overrun them, and all of a sudden the voice of the customer becomes the main battle cry. I speak from experience in the auto industry, where the 3 main domestic players all had their traditional slice of the market back in the 70's and were very comfortable just passing customers back and forth when they pissed them off. It was very common in the good ol' days for the dealers and manufacturers to blow folks off just like Harley does now. By the time I retired, however, I had seen major changes. We had teams for every vehicle subsystem, and those teams included folks from the plant floor all the way to the executive suite and even to dealers. Those teams tracked warranty claims, customer survey results, and internal indicators on a weekly basis. We set up regular contacts with key volume dealerships so we could get immediate information on new problems as they occurred, often to the point of visiting the dealership to assist with the problem or even bringing cars back to the plant for analysis and repair. As soon as trends could be identified, investigations into root cause were initiated. If the customer issues were assembly plant controllable items, we put special inspections and containment actions in place to control the problem until permanent engineering action could eliminate it entirely. In those cases where the product was performing as designed but the customers weren't happy, we didn't just sit back down and say "nothing we can do about that one". We pushed the engineering organization to come up with answers, both interim and permanent. Obviously this approach works quite well, as evidenced by the major improvement in quality ratings (my old employer is now ranked equal to Toyota and Honda in initial quality, and is making huge strides in long term reliability as well).
What H-D needs is some really tough competition to kick start the process. I would love to see someone like Victory start to really kick some ass and then watch all the scurrying in Milwaukee. There is absolutely no reason why H-D can't be first class in customer service and quality, once they eliminate the complacent management.
Jerry
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Topic: 2008 Brake Squeal (Read 8724 times)