Tag: auto safety

OM in the News: The Mercedes-Benz EV on Fire

It took just seconds for an underground South Korean residential parking lot to be engulfed in flames. The culprit: a Mercedes-Benz EQE electric vehicle that had not been charging.

The blaze incinerated dozens of cars nearby, scorched a further 140 vehicles and forced hundreds of residents to emergency shelters as the buildings above the parking lot lost power and electricity. Nobody died, but the fire took eight hours to extinguish. Cars with internal combustion engines are more likely to catch fire than EVs. But when EVs do burst into flames, the rechargeable lithium-ion batteries get hotter and the fire takes longer to stamp out, writes The Wall Street Journal (Aug. 8, 2024).

In recent years, General Motors recalled tens of thousands of its Chevrolet Bolts in the U.S. over risk of battery fires. Hyundai pulled roughly 80,000 electric sport-utility vehicles after roughly a dozen caught fire. Last September, a Nissan Leaf ignited while charging in Tennessee, and the fire required more than 45 times the water needed for a gas-powered-car fire to be extinguished.

Automakers have grown more cautious about EV launches amid modest demand. Sales of fully electric models in the U.S. rose 6.8% through the first half of the year, a sharp deceleration from near 50% growth in 2023.

The perceived risk of EVs is particularly acute in tightly packed South Korea, a country about the size of Indiana with 52 million people. Outdoor residential parking lots are relatively uncommon. The nation’s ubiquitous high-rise apartments often feature underground parking, where firefighters must contend with restricted access. The country had already been on edge about battery-related fires, after a blaze at a lithium-battery factory in June that killed nearly two dozen people.

In recent days, LG Display recommended that employees at its main factory complex park their EVs outside. The country’s main international trade association, whose offices are located in central Seoul, said it would accelerate plans to relocate EV charging ports to its aboveground lot. One of the country’s largest telecommunications firms, KT, has held discussions about barring EVs from parking underground.

Classroom discussion questions:

  1. Which of the 10 OM decisions in your Heizer/Render/Munson text deal with this issue?
  2. What are the OM implications of the South Korean fire?

OM in the News: Now Comes the Hard Part for General Motors

gm recall“Less than a month after General Motors announced it would recall 1.6 million cars because of a defective ignition switch,” writes The New York Times (March 10, 2014), “the automaker now faces an arduous task: fixing the cars.” The process, particularly for older vehicles like the ones G.M. is recalling, is time-consuming and requires many steps, from designing the new parts, testing them to make sure they solve the problem, finding and informing owners, and actually completing the repairs.

The company has just started to send out the recall letters with a stern, if unusual, warning: “Remove all items from your key ring, leaving only the vehicle key.” That is because if the defective ignition switch is jostled, or even if the key chain is too heavy, it can turn off the engine and the car’s electrical system, disabling the air bags. G.M. said it had linked the defect to 31 crashes and 13 deaths since it was first alerted to the problem in 2004. The letter also tells owners that the replacement parts “are not currently available.”  G.M. said the supplier, Delphi, needed to prepare the machines that would make the part before mass production could begin. In some recalls, parts suppliers have already sold off those machines, making it even more time-consuming.

The G.M. recall is large, but it is one more than 900 recalls in the past 7 years, covering 50 million vehicles. While recalls are not unusual, the number of fatalities involved and the way G.M. handled this one stretching over the past decade has the potential to cost the company hundreds of millions of dollars in fines and possible legal damages, in addition to tarnishing its reputation. This is a great story to bring to your class both in the context of Chapter 17 (Maintenance and Reliability) and as an Ethical Dilemma in Chapter 5 (Design of Goods and Services.)

Classroom discussion questions:

1. Why did G.M. wait so long to recall a defect it knew existed for a decade?

2. Why is this recall going to be difficult?