Silver Hyundais Recalled
This is a really funny story, and then a thought-provoking one. It starts: Why Hyundai Has To Recall Only Silver Cars Over A Serious Safety Defect:
For vehicles in the Savile Silver exterior color, the front corner radar signals may reflect off the aluminum content in the silver bumper cover paint and pass through the front bumper beam. These signals may be registered as an object in the opposing lane and can potentially affect Highway Driving Assist (HDA) operation.
So that’s pretty funny, and drives me to ask, what should car companies do about it? The obvious answer is “we should add it to our checklists!” That’s a classical solution, and it contributes to checklists which take an unreasonably long time to execute. (In fact, long checklists are a main topic of discussion in The Checklist Manifesto, which I talked about here, and even quoted a relevant line: “...fire is exceedingly rare... [So fire risks are generally excluded from surgical checklists.]”
In the near term, anyone who works in car design (or paint) will likely have seen this. Adding it to checklists or design reviews isn’t going to add a lot of value, but over time, it will add a lot of work.
Part of the art of good process design is ensuring that the required steps each adds value on a regular basis. That value might be in avoidance of problems, or it might be in assurance that you've checked all the boxes.
If you don't have a good process design, your staff spends time on things like aluminum in paint checks, rather than ensuring that your lines of sight around a vehicle are enough to see children, or that someone's thought about the cognitive load and visual shifts involved in using a touchscreen that goes down to a driver's knees. Or they'll end up not noticing that the space capsule lacks docking capabilities because they're exhausted by checking the “atmosphere is not 100% oxygen.” Obviously, that’s an important item, grounded in real tragedy, and which ties back to the quote from the Manifesto, because surgical checklists are actively studied for overall effectiveness, and effectiveness is an empirical and emergent property.