I went to purchasing and I asked who on the approved source list sells us horns. (We were really out of time. This whole Road Runner car was being done, not overnight, but in less than two months.) They gave me the three horn vendors that we were permitted to buy horns from, so I called the chief engineer of each of these three companies and told them the story. I said, ''I'm going to send you a tape in today's mail. I want you to listen to it at once. Call me back as soon as possible if you have anything in your roster of horns that is anything like this sound: "Beep, beep!"
Very shortly, they all called back. Two of them said, "Not a prayer!" The third one, the Spartan Horn Company and Richie Vanstroodle—who turned out to be a heck of a guy—really wanted to get into the swing of this thing. He said, "Hey, we've got a horn that sounds pretty close. We're building it for a military vehicle. It's built to government specifications. It works under water. And it's really expensive because it meets all these requirements: Forty-five dollars a piece."
I said, "No way! I tell you what, I want you to get your best cost estimator to review that horn. Have him work all night at this. Call me back tomorrow and tell me the cost after you take off all the waterproofing and everything else but keeping it a legal horn, meeting government regulations. Tell me what you can sell it for."
They called back and it turned out to be like a 47-cent penalty over what we were already spending for horns, so we had a horn. Sure, we said we'd buy that little bit of "plus;" at least I say "a little bit." People in the industry would drive each other up the wall just to save a dime on a car. But a dime times a couple hundred thousand cars is a lot of money! In that case, we would have done a lot to save a small amount of money on each car. Cars are implicitly the product of a lot of cost reduction: coldly looking for pennies, trying to get the money out so we can be a competitive company and sell a car for a competitive price.
But we had the horn and it almost fit into the car. The horn was held by one bolt. There's a little tab that goes into one hole and there's a second hole for the screw that mounts the horn. That hole in the horn bracket was about 5/32 of an inch long. So we had to have them move that hole that little distance and moving that hole that little distance was the biggest tooling cost ($243 out of a total of less than $500) associated with the production of the Road Runner car!
Anyway, we had the horn. It turned out that they had a test that had to be conducted on every horn before it was authorized to be released: an engineering cycling test. The horn was placed in a sound-proof box and the switch was flipped—beep, beep, beep, beep—twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. At that rate there wouldn't be enough time to get the test completed in order to support buying it for the start of production of the car. Remember, we were doing this car at the very last minute, so there were a number of things that came up which almost scrubbed the car.
I told my story to the supervisor in charge of the lab and my understanding that his engineering responsibility was to never release anything that hasn't passed all engineering tests. Fortunately, his view of it was, "Hey, I'm responsible for releasing only things that are right, and I can't shirk my responsibility. "
So, I offered hjm a bargain: "If you will release the horn, right now—we both expect that it's going to pass the test—I will write you a letter assuming full responsibility for the horn." Now, I had no authority to do that! Who was I? I was just a product planner, but the guy said, "Okay." And he actually released the horn. And I wrote the letter.
Eventually, after the horn was in production, the test was completed and the horn was a hit. But, it's just a little example of the inter-relationships that were played out in getting the horn and in getting the car itself. We got the horn, we got the bird. We had all the mechanical components.
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