I gather this process, of assuming the first N cars produced were going to be failures, had become something of a corporate culture. Reminds me of the present state of many areas of the software industry, when it comes to product development and deployment. That is, hack up a bunch of code, try it out, see if it fails in obvious ways. If so, figure out how to get it to stop failing in those ways, retry. That kind of failure doesn't prevent the product from appearing to work, but can manifest itself post-deployment when in the hands of a trusting user.
Software development is, however, a bit more amorphous.
The software equivalent of such junk is, usually, the set of intermediate, often fleeting, versions of a product encoded on some developer's hard drive. These failures therefore don't represent quite the same degree of cost of materials wasted on failing junk. Resources Here are some resources that might prove useful in further research. Haven't yet reviewed Bomb Squad - Buggy Software , The Tao Of Programming , Extreme Programming Roadmap , XP in the Chrysler C3 Project , Programming Language Critiques , Programming Language Critiques , or Resources for Programming Language Research , but at quick glance, they look interesting at least. Why Open Source Is The Optimum Economic Paradigm for Software contains some useful insights, at least.