Safety?--Legal system--NOT Justice--(irritating post)

[davidbrady]

Maybe Hish can chime in here on how Tier suppliers work, but the way I understand it an engineering spec between the automaker and Tier supplier for a particular part is like a contract where the details relevant to that specific automaker are spelled out and those not relevant are allowed to be changed by the Tier supplier. Other automakers may have a different spec for the same part with different restrictions. Suppliers may make changes to reduce costs, improve performance, or increase reliability, etc. As long as they still fulfill the contract with the automakers these changes are allowed. Changes like these may not necessarily show up as a different part number to the automaker, but will be recorded as a revision or change order at the Tier supplier. In these sorts of cases an automaker's "signoff" may be a formality.

From what I've read I think the courts are still trying to determine what GM knew, when they knew it, and if they spec-ed a part change to fix a known defect.