Originally Posted by soconfoozed
As others have pointed out, and as I've noted previously, what really upsets me about this process is a lack of ownership by either Subaru or Toyota. There are no faults with our glorious 86. There are no Americans in Baghdad.
Nobody is asking either company to publish engineering data. But to maintain radio silence and insist (again, as noted) that these are all isolated incidents doesn't do the customer any good. It's insulting. Oh, be careful, don't believe everything you read on the internet, anybody can post anything they want without being held responsible. Really? Eff you, buddy. Say, how's that social networking footprint working out for you? What? That's hypocritical?
There's also a really fundamental inability to get things done. I can't believe such well-resourced organizations could be so slow to act, and on top of that, get so many basic things wrong. It was two mistakes and about a full, wasted working week just to get the correct OCV that was eventually replaced on my BRZ to the correct spot on the globe. There's no plan B, either. There's no contingency planning. Where's the BRZ panic kit, full of replacements for all the parts the engineers were still nervous about when production began? How is this level of ineptitude possible?
I swear, I feel like the engineers were all hanging out, watching the assembly line for a few days, making sure everything was ~perfect~. Then one engineer leaned over to another and said "hey, Takahashi, I think the line workers have it down, what about you? Let's go get a beer." Only, they didn't have it down, and then my car got built.
At every step of the way, I've had to fight to get the most basic things done. I'm completely confident that if I hadn't spent so much of my time on this, my car would STILL be in a service bay at the dealer.
Some problems are just hard to solve, and sometimes as an engineer, you can design yourself into a corner. That happens, and when it does, it sucks, because life can become difficult. I feel a very strong sense of duty to get it right for my customers. But when you don't get it right, you find yourself with a new goal that's ten times as important: MAKE IT RIGHT. You damn for certain make sure the customer understands that you want it fixed even MORE than they do, because it's their investment, but your pride. People still actually care about that kind of thing, right? Right? Bueller? Bueller? Bueller?
I'm so beyond caring about any stupid extended warranty, or reimbursement for being without my car for a month. I was clear about that with SoA from the beginning. They kept asking "what can we do, what can we do," and I kept telling them "none of that matters if you don't fix the issue, does it. Focus on the big problem first, then work out the details." And now they're just doing the same friggin' song and dance for everybody else. That pisses me off, because clearly they've learned nothing about customer service. Buying off customers with silly little rewards goes 180 degrees toward fixing an organizational culture that says this crap is okay in the first place. Way to treat the symptom, not the cause, a-hole.
Much as I love my BRZ, and indeed, much as I'm sure I'll enjoy the hell out of it, I'm doubtful at this point that I'll ever choose another Subaru. Sure, other manufacturers may be no better, but the point is that Subaru won't get my money again.
I've tried to make this clear to SoA on numerous occasions and at increasingly high levels of the organization (I know, for instance, that some e-mail potshots to the executive level did get read), but they've made it clear that they just do not care, at all.
It's really just jaw-droppingly amazing to me that a company that treats its customers this way is able to stay in business. Subaru must make money by accident.
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