Why were you fired? (OPEN)

[BlastersPewPew]

Ok, first "challenge" of mine so to speak and it is different than what we have seen so far. I am hoping this format works and the challenge can run for some time, there are no real winners or losers since YOU are the judge of your own design and why you were fired, try to make a little background story, some spice to the failure etc. If you want to go the VW route and be the engineer that was the scapegoat then by all means go for it, if you want to have been fired because you went on a drunken design approval binge then go for it, your failure is your story

Rules are simple, make your car, no limits on cost, year, anything EXCEPT there MUST be a failure of some sort that would make your employer terminate you on the spot, that is where the story comes in because some failures will need a background. Mediocre cars can be great but did you design it with a low quality fuel system that sprayed fuel on the exhaust and burned down your factory? Did you design a super car with 1000HP only to forget to spend money on the transmission and have it grenade on live TV after much fanfare during an Indy/F1/American Racing Series race on the pace lap? Perhaps Clarkson, Hammond and May got their hands on your car and just ripped into it on their show (this doesnt work and this doesnt work and this is hard as a rock). Again, your failure is your story. Last rule, post pics of your stats, car and engine so we can see what you did (or didnt do).

If this is popular enough maybe we could have participants do the "hiring or firing", this should give some good feedback to other players as well as bring a bit more "spice" to the reveals. If you want you can even add your own embellishments to other peoples stories, maybe you were the co-worker that saw the whole thing or the Marshal waiving the green flag.


*As you read through the application of the nervous engineer sitting across the table from you you cant help but frown, 10 years in your rivals engine R&D center and a further 5 in the chassis and body R&D. Nothing came up on the background check, nothing stands out as a black mark on the application save the last entry, you had called his former employer only to be hung up on by the secretary at the mere mention of the engineers name. Curious.*

"So Mr./Mrs./Ms. (fill in the blank), can you explain to me why I can not get a single answer from anyone at your former place of employment about WHY you were terminated? Everyone gives me the run around but your resume is practically shining except for the last entry. I cant say you have the job yet because we dont know why you were terminated but you are a very promising candidate. Now please, start from the top and tell me everything."


Once I am home at my PC I will make my own failure and start the ball rolling if no one else does by that time FEEDBACK APPRECIATED!!!!

[koolkei]

obligatory reddit post:


"it's not me but......."

[strop]

Oho... GG is full of screwballs... how else to fill the roster with otherwise highly qualified staff for a song? I will think of something.

[EnryGT5]

Seishido, being big and varied, and not afraid of making "odd" decisions business and design-wise, has seen quite a few screw-ups.... this is going to be rather amusing.

[Oskiinus]

What about a car that didn't made into Group Automation in 1984/85?

[Lordred]

The reason can be anything you want it to be Oskiinus.

[Zabhawkin]

Yeah so about that. Remember that incident at the SEMA car show where the SUV rolled over in front of pretty much everybody? Well that’s how it ended, but let me take you back to how it all started.

So I was working on a new suspension setup for our new model of SUV that was supposed to be comfortable, capable, and stable. We get the suspension set up and I definitely got the capable and stable, the only problem was it felt like you could feel every imperfection in the road. Well 2 out of 3 was not good enough when that one made even hard core off-roaders wince at the prospect of driving it. So I went back to the designs and looked them over and figured out how we could modify the suspension so it would ride much better. The problem with that was the SEMA auto show was 2 months away and marketing had already announced that we would be displaying our already running next generation SUV. It was going to take 6 months for the rebuild and work out the kinks. So instead it was decided despite my protesting that the bushings would be replaced with much softer versions, and the tires would be replaced with a more pliant sidewall type, and have the tire pressure reduced to 30 psi.

Well that definitely made it much more comfortable. The problem was the softer bushings let the suspension shift, and the softer, lower pressure tires tended to roll onto the sidewall sometimes causing it to pop a bead.

So then comes the show, my boss tells me that he wants me to drive it up on the stage in such a way to show off how sporty it is. Well I know the problems and one thing I can do to make the stability not as bad, and I can take a pretty hard bump in the name of marketing so I fill the tires to 45psi. However unbeknownst to me my boss decides he is going to take some bigwigs for a ride and has the tires lowered to 25 psi to show off how comfortable the ride is.

So here I come nervous because I am not the greatest people person around, heck I became an engineer because I am better with machines than people. I get in not noticing that the tires are visibly low. I’m only going 100 feet so I don’t bother with my seatbelt, speed the SUV toward the stage go up the ramp make the hard right onto the stage, and all hell breaks loose all at once.

As soon as weight returns to the front axle with the tires turned the axle shifts over, the left front tire rolls under and pops off of the bead. The rear axle comes down and does the same thing. The result is the whole thing rolling off of the back of the stage landing upside down all of the windows breaking and spreading everywhere, the airbags all deployed, and I wound up in the back seat bruised, and bleeding from a gash in my head from when it hit the dome light as I bounced my way from the front seat to the back seat.
Well as you can imagine that model now is associated with a violent roll over and a person coming out with blood all over, even before it gets to the showroom.

So the project got canceled I got blamed and that’s how I got fired.

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Spring stiffness is maxed.

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[BlastersPewPew]

ROFLOL!!! Good one!! Even without a car/stats the story was good enough to imagine the whole thing.

That being said *looks down onto your shirt* You have red on you.......

EDIT: Ok pics are there and......................wow..................

[Madrias]

Well, back when I worked for Pharte Automotive, a company best known for making really tiny eco-boxes, I had the brilliant idea to try making, well, I suppose you could say it was supposed to be a luxury sedan, but smaller.

Of course, Pharte made four cylinder engines, and their biggest is a 2 liter block, which, well, let's face it, is great for propelling a city car around, but it just didn't have the guts to move something bigger. So I had the bright idea to make my own crankcase, stick two 4-cylinder heads on it, and make a V8. Then it ended up still feeling a little underpowered, so, naturally, I strapped some turbochargers to it, and cranked up the rev limiter. For the most part, that worked.

When it came to the body of the car, I decided it had to be a four-door sedan, and it really needed to be something special.

After a long time of thinking (and waiting for a budget increase because I was already well past the cost of their usual city car), I created the body of what would become the Spirit. The front two doors opened conventionally, but the rear doors... Well, see those two slots over the rear wheel arch?

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Those allowed the rear doors to slide backward, like the doors on a minivan. The idea, the hope behind it, was that when parked in a typical mall parking lot, at least some damage could be avoided because the doors slide instead of swing. No more kids booting the doors of your big heavy SUV into the eco-hatch next to you.

Surprisingly, that got me all the funding Pharte thought I needed to complete the car. Supposedly, Pharte wanted to show my car at SEMA when it was completed. I got a blank check and direct access to the spending accounts, and I could spend as much as I wanted, within reason. I was informed that I had a hard budget limit at $16,000, however, and that if I spent any more than that, I'd be in serious trouble.

So naturally, I started cost cutting. Big time. Anything that didn't technically need to be there was removed. Anything that I could combine together was combined.

Well, of course I didn't think to check the original bit of hardware I'd made, the engine. Pharte had this funny nature of loving to keep using cast iron in their engines, even though aluminum was lighter. I had two DOHC-4VPS heads designed for the 2L-HPO, their "sports car" four cylinder engine. They had four valves per cylinder, dual overhead cam, with Variable Valve Lift. I monkeyed around with the cams to make them fire in the right sequence, then coupled them to a common four-cylinder crankshaft with thinner connecting rods. Basically, I made a flatplane V8 out of two four-cylinder engines. And yet, sitting there as the common block holding up the cast iron heads... was my cast aluminum engine block.

But, because I didn't think at the time about the engine, I forged onward. The transmission was reworked at the last minute to use engine oil as transmission fluid. That allowed me to couple it to the engine, hook in some oil passthrough lines, and, in theory, saved me a little bit of money designing a transmission fluid reservoir for the 5 speed automatic. I stuck to my original plan to have all-wheel-drive, and I put limited slip differentials in just to gain the little bit of extra performance that I could.

My tires came in at the right time, and in typical eco-car fashion, they were 135mm wide tires, hard life compound, on my 20 inch rims. Essentially, I got screwed, and was suddenly rather glad I had all wheel drive. Would have preferred tires twice that width.

Another problem that surfaced was cooling requirements against Pharte's requirement that the front of the car look clean. That meant no big, obnoxious grilles above the license plate line.

My solution to the problem?

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Vents below the license plate line, and none above it. Now, in theory, I had more than enough cooling capacity for the engine I'd built. In fact, it was rather comfortably over-cooled, which gave me confidence that maybe, just maybe, this design wouldn't be too bad.

Now, anyone who knows cars understands that engines need cooling, yes? I had plenty of cooling capacity, but unless I could pass 18 MPG, they weren't going to show my car at all, nor would they manufacture it. So, despite knowing it would harm reliability, I blocked up about half the vents. That allowed me to pull up the fuel economy just enough to pass their requirements.

With my budget almost gone already, and Pharte insisting I needed to make a five-seat car if it was going to have four doors, I had to go really cheap on the interior. I kept things luxury grade, but ordered parts from the cheapest bidders. Looking back on it, the car wasn't too uncomfortable, and the electrical gremlins in the SatNav system didn't really show up until about three years later. Plus, it's not like it was my fault that the power steering pumps liked to explode, now is it?

One could argue that maybe, just maybe, the hydropneumatic suspension was a bad idea. Especially when on a very tight, dwindling budget. But, I kept hearing about how comfortable and luxurious the ride could be. I had to have it. That and the semi-active sway bar to help with keeping the car drivable. Probably wasn't my brightest idea to cheap out on the suspension, but it worked. Mostly.

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Now, I wanted to do LED tail lights because everyone else was doing LED tail lights. Unfortunately, I'd spent most of the budget already, and a mass shipment of white LED's would have put me dangerously close to the limit. So for the tail lights, each little bulb inside the light housing is nothing more than a flashlight bulb. Apparently, they were a huge pain in the butt to replace when the tiny bulbs burned out.

Now, we showed up to the SEMA auto show with our new car, the Pharte Spirit. The guy before us caused a huge delay because he rolled his SUV across the stage, and it took quite a long time to get the mess cleaned up. Our car worked okay on stage, once we got there, and other than some very mild technical problems, like the air conditioning being stuck on maximum cold, or the radio not working quite right, we had a reasonable time. As I drove the car off the stage, there was a loud clunk, and the rear wheels lost all power. We got the car out of sight, mentioned that this was just a prototype, and set to work finding out what the horrible noise was. I blew the rear differential because, in my haste to get the car ready, I forgot to put oil in it.

But that's not what got me fired.

What got me fired was the next five years of powertrain warranties. You see, that brilliant little cost-cutting measure I had in linking the engine and transmission together, using the engine's oil as transmission fluid? It worked out great, right up until someone decided that they wanted to see if the engine really could rev to 9200 RPM like the tach said. Remember what I said about the engine being a bit of a hack job? Well, I wasn't the one who fully tuned that. Someone in Marketing decided that if we could beat the Honda S2000's 9000 RPM redline, maybe, just maybe we'd sell more cars to young people. If they'd have left it alone with my original 8000 RPM redline, there wouldn't have been as many problems. Instead, some genius in marketing went 1200 RPM above my recommendation. At 9000 RPM, tiny little pieces of the pistons start filling the engine oil.

The same engine oil that's used in the transmission.

Now maybe you do this once or twice, using the sport mode, and you get lucky, where the transmission just shrugs it off and keeps going. But maybe you don't get lucky. Maybe one of those tiny little pieces gets jammed in the fluid control mechanism, and prevents an upshift. At 9200 RPM, the engine is only a fraction away from disintegrating. Maybe one of those pieces comes in contact with the gears and you lose something important, like first or reverse. Or maybe nothing happens for a couple thousand miles, only to hear your mechanic say "uh oh" when he goes to change the oil and gets more metal flakes than fluid.

Combine those failures with the ones caused by dodgy transmissions, and you've got a nightmare on your hands.

After three years, the cars that were driven gently started having problems. The radios went screwy, navigation failed to work, the seats became hard and uncomfortable. Occasionally, the sliding rear doors would come off the track, and that cost a couple thousand dollars to fix. Sometimes the suspension failed and the car would just slump against the bump stops, making a huge puddle of oil on the ground. The power steering pumps tended to clog up, then explode, usually under heavy cornering.

But the thing that got me fired?

In my haste to get the car to meet Pharte's ridiculous demands, I made the poor decision to compromise the safety, to go with the lowest bidder. Supposedly, the only thing keeping people alive in the majority of accidents was the steel chassis refusing to give way. Nine out of ten accidents, the airbags never deployed. Sometimes the seatbelts broke. The windshields tended to shatter and fill the car with glass. But they were the lucky ones.

Everyone's heard of that one car that explodes when hit from behind. Well, ours liked to do much the same.

In a rear end collision, the trunk would collapse. Typically, not a huge deal. Better that the trunk squishes instead of the occupants of the car. However, the gas tank was part of the trunk structure, and in a rear end collision, would crumple like a can in a crusher. The crushed fuel tank tended to spill gasoline all over the exhaust pipes. But what typically sparked the fuel fire was the dodgy tail-light designs. The cheaply made circuit boards tended to spark. Gasoline vapors tend to ignite under sparks. Our carpet in the trunk, the foam in the seats, and the carpet in the car tended to be highly flammable. It was a perfect recipe for disaster.

"But," you may ask, "How on earth did such an unsafe car get past all the safety inspections?"

Remember that blank check? A few million under the table as hush money got the car a high enough safety rating to be sold. Somewhat my revenge on Pharte Automotive for screwing up what could have been my perfect car with their insane demands, their impossible schedule, the ridiculous requirements, and their moronic marketing team. After the lawsuit and investigations into how the car got into the market at all... Well, I got fired.

[squidhead]

One of our employees grandmother used to drive a Pharte Spirit. She thought it was "lovely", God rest her soul. She died of natural causes, if you're wondering.

[koolkei]

@Zabhawkin:

owh mhai gahwd. boatmobile? O_O

i can't even tell if that's an SUV or a Wagon

[Zabhawkin]

Most SUV's are basically big station wagons.

[VosNox]

Awesome. Finally a chance to tell the story of the Luna Star, or, as it's known in the Skunk Works: "Kevin's Folly".
This is a story about Kevin. Not me. Because I've never gotten fired from anything, because I'm fucking perfect.

Anyway...

Upon first glance, anyone of reasonable intellect would assume the Luna Star would make a great car. It had a small foot print, a large interior, a chunky little 135HP 1.6L i4 and a 5-speed automatic gearbox. All in all, something that should have been a recipe for perfection, but...

During the initial R&D phase of its production, it was decided that it was to fill an assumed niche market in the "inner city, underfunded, sport / tuner" arena, or, as Kevin called it: "Poor black kids who just rented Fast and the Furious". Which was initially met with a well grounded sense of speculation, but, as Normandy doctrine states: You can build anything you want, as long as you can explain it, sell it, and put your hemophiliac infant in it when we crash test it."

The freehand design phase went through about six revisions before Kevin went before the review board. It was decided that instead of the traditional "low and slow" design that most manufacturers use to appeal to this market, the Luna Star would adopt something more akin the Scion's "XB" design. With a high roof, 4-door with hatch entry design, FWD power train, and alloy rims as standard. Kevin explain that this would be easy to make, despite design and manufacturing costs, by cutting certain design elements. For instance, instead of using any form of metal, or metal alloy, in the skin of the vehicle was to be a fiberglass, as was, with the exception of certain mounting points, the frame.

Upon the initial assembly of the prototype, which was the frame, body and engine only, the vehicle weighed an astonishing 1500 lbs (680.3 kg), which, combined with the narrow foot print and relatively high center of gravity, meant that if a man of roughly 200 lbs took a running leap at the side, he could easily get it to lift about 20 degree's on to the other wheels. Which was a neat party trick, until it came back down, and the weight caused the axle mounts on the falling side to shear off. This was determined by Kevin to be a "non-issue".

After bolting in a lawn chair and setting off for a preliminary test run, the Luna Star, now simply referred to as the "LS", reach an amazing 47 mpg, which at the time of development was unheard of. This was horrible news to the upper levels of Command, who were desperate to find a reason to scrap the project. You see... Kevin wasn't a smart man, and he had a history of making not-so-smart decisions. The only reason he was allowed to design a car, was because he comes from money, and paid for the operation himself.

Along with the shitty design of the body and frame, he decided he could skip on engine work as well. See, he was going for what one could only imagine as a "high performance bodge job", as in... "Tune this Pinto for drag racing, without spending any money and with this gun to your head." So in that vein, he boosted the engines max rpm's to 8k, which put it about 3000 over the technical limit the engineers vehemently suggested. He also put intentionally small exhaust headers which we had a 90 degree bend because he liked the sound it made. To aid with the "sporty feel" that his warped brain was imagining, he demanded that the gearbox used an incredibly high first gear, which wouldn't shift below 3500. He also demanded that the gearbox come with a "2nd gear start mode" option, which rendered first gear irrelevant anyway. On top of the shoddy quality of tune of the engine, he decided to use blocks produced by his best friend's cousin's start up foundry. His best friend's cousin was not a metal worker by trade. He was an accountant, who did not see the world through human eyes, but rather the eyes of an accountant. So the blocks that were produced had absolutely zero business being fitted to anything that housed and propelled people. The worst part however, were the fuel lines. Which were plastic. All of them. Plastic.

The plastics, fabrics, foams, and imitation carbon fiber that he used to line and trim the interior were of such poor quality that the lead designer quit the project in protest saying, among other things, "This shit has no business in a car. I could light cigarette six miles from this fucking carpet, and it would still burst into flames." The money he saved by skimping on the interior was then moved over to the sound system. A 10-speaker premium sound system, likely worth more than the car itself. The speakers and head unit were of the highest quality, the wiring however, was not.

As with the entertainment system, the rest of the vehicles electronics were well beyond sub-par. The tail lights were taken from the decorative lamps on semi-trailers because, as he put it, he "liked the pokey-outy look". The headlights were modeled after a car he saw in a comic book, and the fog lights were taken from a golf cart. All of which were wired with much the same level of care as the speakers. The nav unit itself was top quality, the software, however, was only programmed with Russian out of the gate, and required a several gig patch to update, but do to the shittiness of the antenna, the upgrade frequently failed. The boot was too shallow due to the fact that the fuel tank was bolted directly underneath and to it. There was no lining for said fuel tank, so fumes would constantly leak into the trunk and into the back seat.

So what happened to the LS?

You see ... before Normandy slaps its badge and credibility on any vehicle it produces, it must be proven. So if you design one, you're given 10 and told to sell them. If you fail, you lose your job, your severance pay, and anyone with your DNA is captured, torn limb from limb, and turned into "Imitation hybrid leather" for our entry level executive saloons. So here enters Kevin, who, after 8 months of constant doubt and back talk, shows up to the SEMA autoshow with a running prototype. The total cost of development was roughly $11,000,000. He was going to sell the car for $13,000.

He invited everyone at the SEMA autoshow to come outside into the cold were he'd show everyone just how good his LS was. So, to the half-hearted cheers of a few on lookers, he threw in a test driver, who was told to slam the breaks, floor the gas and off. After only 70 feet, the pressure and heat caused by the back pressure buildup in the exhaust manifold caused the entire rear end of the block to explode, which catapulted several huge chunks of molten steel through the passenger compartment and out the rear window. At the same time, the flames caused by said explosion ignited fuel vapors caused by the exploding fuel lines which trailed their way into the fuel tank causing a massive explosion which vaporized the LS and sent thousands of pounds of super-heated liquid fiberglass to rain over the crowd. They never found his body.

And what of Kevin? Did his fuck up teach him anything? Of course it did. His failure was so complete and irredeemable that he currently runs a bank that employs nearly thirty people in a small town in South Dakota.

[strop]

Meanwhile, vos himself got fired from his questionable position concerning a shady federal agency for being a terrorist and starting a war with the Russians... But that's another story

[VosNox]

I didn't think meta humor was allowed. lol