I'm sure this guy (Lake Speed Jr) is more intelligent than I am regarding many things. With that said, I watched one of his videos, and he poured a new quart of oil into the engine to flush the oil pan after draining the used oil out. I checked out and never went back.
There are a few things that Lake has done or said, that don't add up. It sometimes leaves me with the feeling that he occasionally says what he thinks will be popular with his audience. This seems to be most often when he is doing a video with other YouTube people. But overall, I think he has learned a lot in doing his videos, and they tend to be more watchable. I do learn a thing or two or more from him.
This isn't the 80s, All OEMs do durability testing and level of engineering these days is much much better. How they act on defects is the business side of things which yea can be cut throat.
If you took a team of 15 people and had them do real world testing for 30 days that's 450 days of testing. Once the car is selling to the public 450 people will take 1 day to reach the same equivalent hours, things may pop up.
Manufacturing is difficult from engines to aerospace hardware things happen. Only thing you can do is learn and move forward. Toyota and GM are both claiming mfg issues leading to failure, now if that's a cover story I think that can be debated.
I also suspect that most every major company tests their products before releasing them to the market. And also agree that, just because they performed the testing, doesn't mean that all issues that are discovered during testing, are addressed before going to market. Without giving details that would identify a manufacturer, I can share an example that I have firsthand knowledge of.
A Tier I / Tier II / Tier III supplier I worked for was developing an improved product, that would be a big step up for a part in the car. They had worked long and hard, and were successful in making this new product. It was tested for all the specifications that were applicable to this product. And it met all of them . . . except one, a federally mandated specification. Samples of the product were tested, but barely failed. New samples sets were prepared and tested, but also barely failed. This process was repeated until over 300 samples had been tested, all with similar results. Test methods were carefully evaluated and scrutinized. Lab technicians were retrained. But the results stood true, at just short of meeting the Federal specification.
Finally the decision was made to select passing samples from different sample sets, so passing data could be submitted to the customers. And the product went to market. A lot of product. To a lot of customers.
This known shortcoming never did cause any issues for the customers or end users. The test requirement exceeded actual market conditions, particularly if other conditions in the assembly that this product went into, were ok.
But just because a weak product gets to market doesn't mean the manufacturer didn't test, or didn't know about it. For a number of reasons, bad products still make it to market. Can we all say together, GM ignition switch?
