Having spent 22 years of my post college life in quality assurance and related fields, and observing the rise and fall of American quality, and comparing it to Japanese quality, let me share my thoughts.
Ultimate quality does not equate to never failing. What it does equate to is that level of reliability that fully satisfies the market need. From the manufacturer's point of view why build a product that will last 200,000 miles when 90% of the products will never reach 80,000 miles? To do so requires a needless expenditure of resources. Now, if 60% of the products will reach 50,000 miles, and a specific product has a 90% failure rate at 15,000 miles then that is not ultimate quality. If the company is pursuing ultimate quality they will reevaluate the product design and manufacturing and make whatever changes are needed to reach ultimate quality. Japanese products by and large are known for high quality. But they are not over engineered. They are engineered for a reliability level that satisfies the majority of consumers. In other words, they are good enough, not better, not worse, but good enough!
All Joe is saying is that at 11,000 miles the BRP idler still looks and functions well. Will it last 50,000 miles? We don't know yet. Will Doc's idler last 50,000 miles? More than likely. It might even last 200,000 miles. If it does, it's over engineered. If the BRP one lasts 50,000 miles it's engineered pretty damn good. If it lasts only 15,000 miles then that means BRP does not understand ultimate quality, or some of their people share the mindset of automotive engineers of 40 years ago where parts were designed to fail so as to save manufacturing costs, or they just don't know what the design really needs to be. Are they designing for a deliberate cash flow for dealers? I doubt it. There's too much of an economic risk in doing that as there is the big unknown about how large the spare parts stock needs to be. Are they designing the idler with the full expectation that 30% of them will fail before the bike is no longer ridden regularly? Maybe. Maybe that's the level of reliability that keeps the cost attractive and the size easy to fit. Maybe they're designing and pricing it at a level that will counteract the negative publicity the belt vibration has brought over the years. Maybe in their assessment the after market parts, although of high quality, are not priced attractively enough to lure as many riders to add an idler as they believe need to to quiet the discontent.
One thing we know for sure. We will never know what the internal thinking in BRP is with respect to anything related to the Spyder.
