Another car company would not have delivered cars to the dealers if they knew that components were faulty at the time of delivery. They would have held the cars on the factory lot and replaced the components prior to shipping, because recalls are very expensive and can trigger other legal consequences to the company.
Thus, recalls are only used by other automakers for problems discovered after a unit has been manufactured and shipped, not for problems discovered during the assembly of a unit. For example: if vehicles 0-99 were shipped before a problem was discovered with a component in unit 100, vehicles 0-99 gets recalled, and vehicle 100 stays on the factory lot until the replacement component is ready and installed. Vehicles 100-125 might get built before the replacement component is ready depending on how the automaker has structured their factory line and whether the component is a critical component, and if so they also remain on the factory lot. Vehicles 126+ are assembled with the replacement component so they get shipped after assembly is complete.
Notably, car manufacturers work like this currently, but before Japanese manufacturing methods took over, US-made cars were notorious for shipping with all kinds of flaws, with the classic anecdotes about people receiving cars with beer cans rattling inside of doors.
> Another car company would not have delivered cars to the dealers if they knew that components were faulty at the time of delivery
Very Very doubtful. There is some accountant math that goes into those types of decisions. If that car made it all the way to the buy off ride and into manufacturing with those components and it was found later that they failed faster than expected or didn't always work quite right. They are not going to hold those cars back unless it causes a catastrophic and probably fatal, to the occupants, failure.
Otherwise they will hope it will fail outside of warranty and charge your for it.
My wife’s cousin is a dealer mechanic, and he described this really perverse incentive WRT GM.
If the dealership sees a particular failure mode and reports it to GM, then they’ll issue a TSB (or maybe even trigger a recall). But in doing so, they’ll only pay a fixed fee to the dealer.
Instead, what happens is that the dealer has an incentive to build a local knowledge base on how to fix the common problems but not share it with GM as they can bill the repairs hourly.
(The specific failure mode he used as an example was inadequate weatherproofing in door electrics. The local fix was to pop-rivet the bottom of a plastic container in the right place so as to improve weather resistance)
Car manufacturers don't do that anymore. They learned from Ford's mistake with the Pinto. Also, it costs significantly more to replace parts by recall than it does to simply hold back vehicles at the factory, on the order of 10-20x as much $$$, since there are additional legal and regulatory requirements associated with recalls, and generally releasing a car with known flawed parts means treble damages come into play in any legal proceeding (meaning, 3x damages awarded to the plaintiff).
Thus, recalls are only used by other automakers for problems discovered after a unit has been manufactured and shipped, not for problems discovered during the assembly of a unit. For example: if vehicles 0-99 were shipped before a problem was discovered with a component in unit 100, vehicles 0-99 gets recalled, and vehicle 100 stays on the factory lot until the replacement component is ready and installed. Vehicles 100-125 might get built before the replacement component is ready depending on how the automaker has structured their factory line and whether the component is a critical component, and if so they also remain on the factory lot. Vehicles 126+ are assembled with the replacement component so they get shipped after assembly is complete.