Do auto makers make mid-year design improvements?

[eltaco]

I’m curious from those who have some insight to the auto industry. I’ve been in product design my entire career, but not in automotive. It can be common in other industries for products to receive design improvements any time while those products are on the market or customer issues warrant it.

Let’s use the electrical concern as an example. There is some percentage of customer failures being reported. If Ram engineering were to arrive at a hardware solution, would Ram wait until 2026 model year to correct it, or would they integrate that solution at any time during the model year to reduce potential for more failures immediately?

This question is specific to hardware changes and assumes software solutions could be updated at any time if it is found to be the culprit.

 

[double0jimb0]

Most/all of these failures seem to be QA issues. QA issues will be rapidly fixed as soon as identified and traced to a fixable process change/inspection.

Now if something needs a design change (meaning something was actually designed/engineered incorrectly, which are a completely different than QA issues) that’s gonna take a while depending on how extensive the fix is, MY 2027 would probably be reasonable timeline for design changes.