
Hyundai Whistle-Blower, in Rarity for South Korea, Prompts Recall - JumpCrisscross
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/16/business/hyundai-south-korea-whistle-blower-recall.html?em_pos=large&emc=edit_dk_20170516&nl=dealbook&nlid=65508833&ref=headline&te=1&_r=0
======
pcurve
As someone who's been following this issue pretty closely, I'm very skeptical
about what they could fix.

This is a fundamental engine design issue in their popular Theta II engine
that results in premature and excessive wear on cylinder wall, leading to
excessive noise, vibration, stalling, and ceased operation.

In a quest to save weight and increase power, they made connecting rod too
thin and height of the bearings too narrow to hold unwanted movement of
pistons in check. Instead of piston moving just up and down, there was sideway
play often resulting in severely scratched cylinder wall after 15k mile of
driving. There are many reports of connecting rods grenading altogether.

For those not familiar with engine parts, here it is.
[https://image.slidesharecdn.com/sixstrokeengineppt-140826102...](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/sixstrokeengineppt-140826102700-phpapp01/95/six-
stroke-engine-ppt-21-638.jpg?cb=1409048910)

Hyundai found out about this pretty quickly, and de-tuned engine output in
later iterations to increase reliability. Yet, they have consistently denied
this design defect as a problem for many years.

There already has been multiple massive class action lawsuits and recalls on
this in the U.s. since 2015. Many Korean customers were angry that Hyundai was
not issuing the same recall in their home country, where they often pay higher
price than identical exports.

[http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/hyundai-kia-recall-
engin...](http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/hyundai-kia-recall-engine-
failures/)

The only fix that will 'stick' is complete engine replacement.

I hope Korean customers get the same treatment.

~~~
userbinator
_Hyundai found out about this pretty quickly, and de-tuned engine output in
later iterations to increase reliability._

Coincidentally, I was recently reading about early American cars and their
heavily overbuilt construction is a huge contrast to this "value engineering"
of modern engines; whereas those old engines could be tuned to make far more
than stock power with little effect on reliability, it seems today the aim is
to make the margin as narrow as possible --- just enough to get past the
warranty period, with the associated effect that, due to how the statistics
work, quite a few of them will fail before too. Samsung's "exploding" washing
machines are a recent, non-automotive, example of this.

Today's cars may be more efficient and less polluting, but if they last a
fraction of the time as the old ones and have to be replaced many times more
often, are they really that much better environmentally overall?

~~~
lutorm
I don't believe for a minute that modern cars last less long than old cars.
Have you actually used a 60's or 70's car as a daily driver? The big
difference is also maintenance. If you've ever had an old car you know about
oil change intervals that's maybe 25% of modern cars, constant valve
adjustments, distributor problems, carburetor adjustments, etc.

Modern cars as a rule go hundreds of thousands of miles without major problems
while using a fraction of the gasoline per mile and producing a fraction of
the pollution.

Yeah, sometimes they get it wrong and design something that doesn't last. But
do you think that didn't happen before, too? Remember that the models we know
and remember 50 years later are the winners. There's a strong survivorship
bias at work here.

~~~
kw71
None of those 1970s cars broke because the factory used plastic parts in the
engine. When you have experience with that and then find "Oh the plastic
theromstat housing cracked" on your "modern" car, that appears to be a
regression.

~~~
rototiller
Oh yes they did - and the plastics were not as advanced either so they were
worse. For example: 1970 Lincoln Continental 460 v8 with plastic timing chain
sprockets for "low noise".

~~~
kw71
I was aware of some screw ups of futuristic engineering from 1970s detroit but
not this one!

------
itsmemattchung
> But in March, South Korea’s Anti-Corruption and Civil Rights Commission
> ruled that he should get his job back. Mr. Kim returned to Hyundai last
> month, but the carmaker had been challenging the commission’s decision with
> an administrative court. On Tuesday, the two sides appeared to reach a deal,
> with Mr. Kim resigning from Hyundai and the company withdrawing both the
> lawsuits and the complaint to the police, a Hyundai spokeswoman said.

Even if the courts required a company to restore my employment, I would find
it impossible to walk into the office of the company that I had whistleblew.

~~~
jacquesm
Vindicated whistleblowers should get a raise and a promotion. Instead they are
the subject of prolonged acts of revenge.

Engineers speaking out about safety issues that then get swept under the
carpet must be amongst the most frustrated people in the world. First you go
to school for many years to learn how to do the very best job you can and then
some pencil pusher annuls all that by refusing your input because it affects
the bottom line in a negative way.

Kudos to this man, I'd hire him in a heartbeat if I was in a position to do
so. He's even more courageous than it might seem at first glance because in
the society he's from this is an absolute taboo to the point where airplanes
have crashed because people did not dare to disagree with someone senior in
rank.

~~~
radicaldreamer
They should really get a minimum settlement (10 years pay or something
similar), because it's completely unreasonable to think that it would be
tenable for them to continue their employment without severe strain.

~~~
philipov
Not just that, but the exposure hurts their chances of getting a new job with
another organization as they become branded 'disloyal,' which is a quality
managers don't like even if they're not explicitly breaking the law.

~~~
anigbrowl
I wonder whether MBA students learn about the Coase theorem, for which there's
abundant empirical evidence. It seems to me that deliberate attempts to shirk
the costs of externalities are little more than the 'conspiracy to defraud the
publick' that Adam Smith famously mentioned.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coase_theorem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coase_theorem)

~~~
paulgb
I'm not seeing how a theorem about resource allocation applies here?

~~~
anigbrowl
It has broad applicability because many externalities are torts.

------
cnnsucks
>> “Engineers are like that,” Mr. Kim said. “We don’t lie.”

Hmm. That's pretty general, but he may be right. The engineers willing to lie
tend to get promoted to management to do the necessary lying on behalf of the
engineers that aren't.

~~~
mickronome
I have a 'pet theory' (ie random thought that crossed my mind a few times),
that to become a good engineer or software developer you need to have, or make
yourself a perspective of the world, and your place in it, where you don't
need to - even subconsciously - lie to yourself in order to feel all right.

It almost appears as if the brain almost doesn't allow us to see what we need
to see, and think what we need to think to be good at those task, if doing so
will interfere with our self image and/or worldview in a similar vein as our
more physical self-preservation instincts make it very hard to consciously do
things that will cause pain or harm.

I don't think it is about having to be altogether rational or truthful, but
rather that you and the perception of whatever world you experience will not
be significantly challenged by the observations you do each day, the thoughts
you experience, and the decisions you make.

~~~
bkmartin
This is sort of along the lines of something I've commented on with my wife a
couple of times recently. People like to see themselves as doers of good, not
evil. It helps keep a person sane. Not many people are okay with being bad
people (doing unethical things on purpose). So what do we do when we are
acting unethically? We have internal justifications and rationalizations that
we use to excuse unethical behaviors in our own minds in order to keep a
positive picture of ourselves in our own minds or identities.

~~~
et-al
As a tangent, this also reminds me of what an NYTimes op-ed columnist wrote
about the current administration:

> Truth be told, the incessant lying by this president and the elaborate
> apparatus he has built in the White House to bend reality to meet those lies
> means that nothing they say is to be believed anyway, but this is of a
> different nature. This says to America: I’m going to tell you a lie that is
> so outrageous that you will want to believe that some part of it is true, to
> preserve your faith in truth, democracy and mankind.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/10/opinion/trump-letter-
come...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/10/opinion/trump-letter-comey.html)

No one wants to believe they made a bad decision because like you said, they
want to be doers of good.

------
bitmapbrother
Not disclosing automotive defects should be punished to the full extent of the
law. Until examples are set there will always be known internal defects that
are never disclosed and only addressed when discovered by external sources.

~~~
sooheon
Exactly. I never understand why courts spend so much time prosecuting
individuals who kill one or two people by drunk driving, when there are these
despicable individuals whose completely sober decisions result in the deaths
of thousands.

------
vesak
>Kim Gwang-ho, an automotive engineer, did something last year that many South
Koreans saw as an act of betrayal

Is this really the Korean mentality? It makes me wary of buying anything from
that country if it is, let alone something expensive and potentially dangerous
like a car.

~~~
hunterjrj
If you're going to exclude purchasing products from an _entire nation_ based
on perceived issues of "mentality", you'd better ditch all of your American
goods:

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-06-18/gm-
recall...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-06-18/gm-recalls-
whistle-blower-was-ignored-mary-barra-faces-congress)

~~~
vesak
Sure, I can do that :)

That article about GM says nothing about how the US public thinks about
whistleblowing, does it? Could be wrong but I think they generally respect it.

------
staticelf
I very recently purchased a new Hyundai i30. Should I be worried?

~~~
GFischer
According to another poster, it's a design error on the Hyundai Theta II
engine. The i30 uses a different one.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyundai_Theta_engine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyundai_Theta_engine)

[http://www.hyundaiproblems.com/trends/theta-ii-
engine/](http://www.hyundaiproblems.com/trends/theta-ii-engine/)

------
drderidder
Interesting how a country's culture can have such an affect the quality of its
products.

Kudos to Kim Gwang-ho.

------
known
Reminds me of Snowden

