That’s a limited view. Costs make the initial investment business case via labor rate arbitrage, but process improvement and automation sustain the long term ROI.
Large companies have enormous internal political challenges and culture problems, and outsourcing requires a process focus to deliver from planning through production where these barriers have to be eliminated over time, especially as jobs are eliminated through automation.
It is incredible that anybody could believe that anything coming out of China is automatically low quality, for example. I would be more wary of a US company suddenly onshoring production of a product where there is no long standing U.S. manufacturing experience in that product. Nobody just magically builds a best practice and executes based on their ethnicity and robots don’t really care about real estate or humans.
So many OEM auto parts are now shared among models that it is a huge leap of faith to believe that what is going into a base model is a premium part for a high end model.
If you don’t believe me, buy a Sequoia. The shared drivetrain is Land Cruiser and the shared other stuff mostly is not. I have an ‘04 (new to me at 253K) and the door checks are all failing, the power lock actuators are all failing, I’m so sick of pulling door panels I could scream.
But the damn thing drives like new at 282K miles from a drivetrain perspective. And it gets Wix filters, although I’ll probably buy OEM since Brown Santa shows up at my door about daily anyway and there’s zero cost impact.
That’s the real value of this thread rather than suggesting suing a filter company over something that has no emotional value to a third party audience and practically no claim value.
If I was going to call somebody, it would be my insurance company since from that perspective this totaled the rig.
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