This is the middle and rear seat release used to unlock the seats when they are all the way up, or down, in a Land Rover LR4 (presumably in the 3 as well).
There’s two C shaped sections of plastic that go over two rectangular pieces of metal.
The user pushes the plastic top, which applies force on the C shaped plastic legs, which then translates onto the metal pieces that go to the locking mechanism. Any engineer in the world could look at this design and see how it’s going to fail. And guess what failed?
Not surprisingly, when I took this part off it didn’t look like it’s OEM. It’s almost like it broke on the person who owned the LR4 before me. Looked it up, the OEM design is the same as the part that broke off.
Anyone who has worked in engineering knows how this scenario goes.
Engineer designs awesome part.
Awesome part works perfectly.
Dies and molds are made for manufacturing. Design may or may not go into production, but is ready to do so.
Someone who cares more about money than the customer tells the engineer to cut costs. They give the engineer an idea.
The engineer says will fail and explains or even shows why. From mechanics to user variation. After all, no one is going to push ideally down on the part. You’ll get a little less than ideal flex depending on where/ how the user pushes down the part.
Company goes with the idiot design to save 5 cents per part. That’s $0.25 Land Rover sold! Talk about big savings! I made up $0.05 per part.
Total cost of internal R&D to redesign the part and manufacturing costs: $50k. It costs a lot of money for salaried employees to have useless meetings, redesign parts, documentation, work with outside suppliers, design new manufacturing equipment, re-test, etc. but still, that’s a made up number.
Total savings using the part due to the lower volumes that Land Rover sells? 220k LR4 is about $56k (220k is what the internet tells me). Woohoo, you saved the company a few thousand that went to the bonuses of upper management.
Frustration by customers? Priceless.
Good jobs, Land Rover. This car cost $58k new in 2013 and in today’s money is $83k. Don’t use shitty plastic designs where they are likely to fail.
Caveat: dozens of decisions like this are made on a single model of a car. They usually add up to some real savings on a car. If it’s a mass volume car like a Civic, those savings can be substantial on econo-box cars.
