Reposting for visibility. The original question was why address design structure in the wake of a 2 billion dollar loss on ev side of the business.
@ff I would say both. Studio for reasons mentions by a few people here. It's honestly an antiquated group within the company. Very old school way of thinking there. As the company evolves around them they are stuck in a bubble of arrogance. Way too top heavy on the salary structure, just look at the amount of level 7/8s there vs how many people actually do the work. Others areas at wtc might have one L8 covering hundreds of workers. Over there it feels the opposite.
As far as design when it pertains to production parts and process's I would say there is some bloat on that end as well. You start talking about DREs that "own" one or two widget parts on the car or maybe a couple models. They didn't design the part, there might not be changes to the parts, there might have been no issues since the part was designed but for some reason we need to have a whole group support it. That goes for almost every system and part put on the car. Leadership is scrambling trying to right the ship but they are cutting the wrong items out of our proven process's. Ask yourself why we still have multi thousand car floats that need repair at ALL of our plants... I'll answer for you... We didn't actually test anything like we used too because some out of touch boomer thinks AI and virtual reality will solve the companies problems. While we are at it why is so much money being dumped into battery development at this Wallace lab and the shuttering of mock up. The public has spoken, not many people want evs, especially without the tax credit. maybe Steve Jenkins can answer at the next Cole podium fireside lunch and learn brought to you by Starbucks