We joke about waiting two years before buying a new model Morgan. We joked about letting the early buyers do the development work to iron out the bugs.
The M3W saga brought this sad truth home with an underdeveloped product, which at the same time still attracted a huge loyalty. But this was in the £30k arena.
Now we see the CX cars suffering from what may be under development, they are certainly not currently engineered to a sustainable level, and this is in three areas which we know about, all of which are tried and tested engineering categories, and should be reliable without question.
Hindsight shows us that initial concerns about a soft brake pedal were just the start of this saga. The squealing brakes and the fix of inverting the calipers was amusing, but an indicator of what some might regard as under development.
To a lesser extent we've seen some of this with the Trads. The Caparo calipers with ill fitting pads, which leave an unworn strip of pad material on the outside of the disc for example. This has not gone away. Nor has the potential for the plastic end tanks on those composite Trad radiators to crack and cause a rapid coolant loss. The weak rear spring saga was also something which, as Heinz said above, we assumed was because it's hard to find a manufacturer of quality leaf springs. This was also true for the MGB twenty years ago, It's maybe ironic that the things which are generally reliable on Trads, the chassis, the crosshead, and the kingpin/stub axle design are the very things regarded as old fashioned and a weakness, whereas the truth is that these components can be relied on to do their job day in day out.
Certainly when I restored my 17 year old MGB, the master cylinder, radiator and road springs were all fit to reuse. In fact I did reuse the front springs. The rest I replaced because I chose to.
Any car costing £90 should be reliable. It's sad to witness all of this unfolding as it is. The practices adopted by MMC to deal with the M3W issues won't work with cars costing three times as much.
