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Comment by nimbius | Hacker News Reader

this kind of fraud is absolutely rampant in the automotive industry for example.

Speaking from experience as an engine mechanic, Ive had to replace transmission parts for a certain well-known japanese SUV maker. They also make a "luxury" version of this SUV with more horsepower and a turbocharger setup. The transmissions however are virtually identical with a very major exception: the M5PVL transmission gear for the luxury SUV has 15% more nickel than the non-luxury. These parts are not interchangeable, but shadier parts dealers will often interchange them. placing the regular gear in the luxury SUV has life-threatening consequences, and this has been documented in recall data from the manufacturer.

under turbo-load, once the gear is engaged, it basically explodes. These failures often exit the transmission case, breach the cockpit of the vehicle and wound the occupants.

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I'm scratching my head as to the possible identity of the mystery SUV. Luxury SUV, Japanese, uses a turbo... maybe the Acura RDX? And the transmission housing is not stout enough to contain gear shrapnel?

Toyota / Lexus ?

He's referring to Toyota. They are globally recalling Toyota Corollas for failing torque converters. https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/toyota-2019-corolla-hatch...

Clearly Toyota didn't know it was happening in their supply chain, but now they do.

That article is for CVT's, which don't use shiftable gears. Google-fu leads to this forum post from 2009, which references Acura directly:

https://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1473068&cid=30...

Not to jump to any conclusions, but judging by the common user name, it seems possible that that's the same poster as the GGGP.

If you’re engineering to protect against fraud then maybe you would make them different sizes? Or only make one kind of part?

That would be my first instinct as well. Atleast when I interned metallworking, the supervisor did have atleast one lesson where they talked about making sure components don't fit into places they shouldn't. If two gears on a machine have different requirements then they should be made to not fit into eachother's places. It makes maintenance easier since there is only 1 correct way to build the machine from any set of spare parts.

Sometimes that is not enough:

In this rocket malfunction, a part was installed upside down. It had arrows indicating the direction and only fit in its place in one orientation. Still, on finding that it didn't immediately fit a technician forced it in:

http://www.russianspaceweb.com/proton_glonass49.html#culprit

By July 13, investigators simulated the improper installation of the DUS angular velocity sensors on the actual hardware. As it turned out, it would be very difficult to do but not impossible. To achieve that personnel would need to use procedures and instruments not certified either by the design documentation or the installation instructions. As a result, the plate holding the sensors sustained damage. Yet, when the hardware recovered from the accident was delivered to GKNPTs Khrunichev, it was discovered that the nature of the damage to the plate had almost exactly matched the simulated version.

You can't do much against an engineer willing to weld and cut their way through the parts.

Similarly, we can't do anything about people using a soldering iron to make customizations to their motherboards. Everything that happens, it's on them.

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