Nissan Finds Faults With Rogue Before Production

FARMINGTON HILLS, MI – In an effort to catch problems before the ’14 Rogue cross/utility vehicle finds its way onto U.S. driveways, Nissan has instituted what it calls “hard-to-fail” pre-production checks.

The new quality system seeks to make sure the assembly process is foolproof, or “hard to fail,” and comes as a clear reaction to lessons learned with previous new-vehicle launches, Carla Bailo, senior vice president-research and development at Nissan Americas, tells WardsAuto at the auto maker’s technical center here, where the ’14 Rogue was unveiled this week.

Over the past four to five months, Nissan has been relying on manufacturing and R&D workers both at its Smyrna, TN, assembly plant and the Detroit-area technical center to weed out faults with pre-production units of the new Rogue, on sale in November.

So-called “champions” of the hard-to-fail process were tasked with uncovering flaws, bringing them to the attention of the development team, then ensuring the problems were solved, Bailo says.

One example was inaccessible wiring and electronics for the Rogue’s optional power liftgate.

“When we first started doing a production trial on this car, (we discovered) all of the electronics for the power back door (were) being routed through the headliner,” Bailo says.

With no way to access the electronics other than removing the headliner, Nissan devised three detachable plastic caps, one at the cargo-roof edge and one on each of the side walls, to provide easier access.

“That way, when the plant needs to repair something, if there’s a missed connection, they don’t take down the whole headliner, they just remove the cap,” Bailo says.

Another fix to make assembly easier for workers involved revising how the body-control module is mounted beneath the instrument panel.

“It was very labor-intensive, (involving) many connections and several blind connections, which we try to prevent,” Bailo says.

Now the entire body-control module is “very fail-safe for the technicians to manage,” and they can see what they’re doing during the vehicle-assembly process, she says.

Reducing or simplifying the steps in the vehicle-assembly process also is targeted by the process. Nissan last year added more than 800 new workers for a first-ever third shift at Smyrna, and this year plans to add another 900 new employees, largely to support the Rogue’s assembly.

“We’ll be training them to make sure they can do the job properly,” says Dan Heur, overseas chief vehicle engineer for the CUV. “But to accelerate that we wanted to make the processes they’re doing much easier as well.”

Pleased with the results of hard-to-fail, Nissan plans to roll out the quality process at its Canton, MS, and Mexico plants, Bailo says.

Hard-to-fail also has led the auto maker to analyze early on the way a component is designed or installed.

“We realize we really shouldn’t have to fix these things during the production trials. We really should have done them from the very beginning,” she says. “So the team in the U.S., including manufacturing, including our (R&D) team, will be in Japan at all the key decision meetings, reviewing each and every one of these elements much more seriously than we’ve done in the past.”

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