From: andrew@frip.WV.TEK.COM (Andrew Klossner)
Newsgroups: rec.autos
Subject: LH Engineering article
Date: 9 Jan 93 20:13:13 GMT
Reply-To: andrew@frip.wv.tek.com
Organization: Tektronix Color Printers, Wilsonville, Oregon

I few days I ago I tried to summarize this article, but didn't do a
good job.  Here is the entire article.  This is Patrick Bedard's column
from page 31 of the December 1992 issue of "Car and Driver" magazine.

Copyright (c) 1992 by Hachette Magazines, Inc., All Rights Reserved.
Reproduced without permission.

---------------

What's the most boring predicament you can imagine?  How about a month
in church?  I haven't done that yet, but I worked at Chrysler
engineering once.  My job was to help carry over the B-body suspension.
One day I woke up at quitting time to the realization that those
ancient pieces, already passed down once, might outlive me, too.  The
beanies had paid for the tooling -- imagine a Xerox machine for steel
-- which meant that suspension copies cost nothing apiece and they
could keep sliding that same design through the copier until ... well,
rebates were beyond my imagining at the time, but they were later
invented to move obsolete cars built on just such primordial tooling.

First chance, I went over the wall.

Two years ago, the New Chrysler Corporation started talking up the
Viper real loud.  But behind the hype, the rebates were rising on the
K-car and I figured it would take a cattle prod to wake up the poor
zombies carrying over its suspension.

Imagine my surprise then when I talked to a few Chrysler engineers and
every one of them was vibrating in his chair he was so excited about
his job.

Now I see why.  They were hatching Intrepid-Vision-Concorde, the first
all-new sedan out of Chrysler in eleven years.  Lucky bastards.

Inspired bastards, because code-name LH is a world-class piece of work,
thoughtfully conceived, meticulously executed, as outstanding today as
the Taurus was in 1985.  The Japanese would be proud to have done this
car; the Germans would double the price.  But it wasn't the Japanese or
the Germans or Ford who did the LH.  It was the K-car crew, sorely out
of practice in new cars and, let's face it, famous for the third-best
work in Detroit.

How do you go from Detroit back-marker to world class in one leap?

Even the best makers usually avoid all-new cars and all-new engines at
the same time, yet the LH has a fresh-baked 3.5-liter, 24-valve V-6 as
an option, projected to be in half the cars.  Gordon Rinschler,
executive engineer on engines, is to tickled with the way he spends his
days he says, "I can't believe they pay me."

"We got to put in all the good parts," he says, ticking off the list:
forged crank, cross-bolted mains, windage tray, free-floating wrist
pins, bottom-feed injectors.  He enthuses about the water pump:  they
took some risks on a plastic impeller, hoping that molded vanes --
instead of the usual sheetmetal stamping -- could be curved exactly
right for a breakthrough in efficiency.  The end result requires only
two horsepower at the redline.

He delights in the crankshaft thrust bearing, too.  They had some early
problems with the torque converter pushing hard enough on the crank to
eat the bearing.  So he challenged his guys to invest a *forever*
bearing.  And they did it, the first thrust bearing he knows of that
uses hydrodynamic lubrication, everyday stuff on a journal bearing but
miraculous on what amounts to a flat washer.

Yes, all of this good stuff costs money, and he's a bit over budget.
But he thinks he can refine the overage out without giving up his good
parts.  He wants to.  He intends to.  Because, by God, this is *his*
motor, his and the other guys' who work on it.

"Ownership" is a word you hear a lot at Chrysler now.  Glenn Gardner,
general manager of engineering on the LH, says that "ownership is still
the most powerful motivator for any of us."  Damn right.  The Soviet
Union fell apart because everything was owned by somebody else -- the
government -- so everybody let somebody else take care of it.

Ownership Chrysler-style means that management doesn't tell the
engineers how to design a car.  It tells them what customers they have
to please, and how much money they have to work with, and when they
have to be finished, but it's up to the people working on the parts to
decide how they should be.

One of the young valvetrain engineers came to Rinschler early on
wanting to know what redline he should work toward.  The answer was,
"What do you want it to be?"  The young man couldn't believe that *he*
would be allowed to decide.  But Rinschler assured him that was the
case.  After a lot of agonizing, the guy decided, if it were *his*
motor, he'd want it good to 7000.  His colleagues agreed.

"They took that decision and beavered away at it," Rinschler says,
pride in his voice.  Now, in production, the injectors cut fuel
delivery at 6400, but the oily parts would happily zing to seven if
allowed.

This kind of ownership is what makes small companies soar.  But big
companies, with their inevitable top-down management, keep bumping
their heads.  I was carrying over the B-body suspension because my
boss's boss's boss's boss's boss said to do it.  That's all I knew.  It
was a depressing job, and I was as lousy at it as any Soviet
apparatchik.

A team is a fragile state of mind.  Gardner talks about the absolute
necessity of consensus.  He counts 741 technical people who had to be
in agreement on what would go into the LH.  "If you disagree, raise
your hand.  The only person who can lower a hand is the one who raised
it."  When all hands were lowered, everyone had bought into the plan.
They owned it.  And from then on, they had a personal interest in
making it work.

Even though the LH is done, Chrysler's team approach keeps evolving,
inspired by Japanese methods, made urgent by the threat of bankruptcy,
but most of all propelled along day to day by a chemistry of
open-minded people who know they're on to a very good thing.

Teams are not new.  The team approach created the Taurus, thereby
resuscitating Ford, but the company couldn't wait to throw away the
game plan.  The American culture is anti-team.  We glory in
individuals, not in team players.

This same America, I keep hearing, is over the hill.  We still have
plenty of capital and our land mass still yields bounteous resources,
but we can't compete.

Capital and resources are merely raw materials.  To them an industrial
nation applies the talent of its people.  That's the way wealth is
created.  America's problem is that it wastes too much of its talent.

Chrysler, amazingly, has found a way to draw a world-class car from
people with only K-cars in their portfolios.  This is alchemy -- gold
from formerly wasted materials -- the exact formula for a new age of
industrial prosperity.  Alas, too late for this fallen-away engineer,
but just in time for America.
Newsgroups: rec.autos