Here is a brief excerpt from an article by Malcolm Gladwell for The New Yorker. To read the complete article, check out others, and obtain subscription information, please click here.

Construction Credit: Stephen Doyle

* * *

To the public, a car either is or isn’t faulty. To an engineer, imperfections and compromises are inevitable.

In the early nineteen-seventies, Denny Gioia worked in the recall office of the Ford Motor Company. His job was to read field reports from the engineers Ford had posted around the country. If a safety problem was spotted, the Ford representative in that district would write up the case on a standardized form—single sheet, two sides, sometimes with a photograph stapled to the page—and send it on to Detroit.

Gioia looked for patterns. “You have to be able to identify something that’s breaking,” he said not long ago. “Otherwise, I’ve got an imaginary event. I try not to engage in magical thinking. I’ve also got to have a pattern of failures. Idiosyncrasies won’t do. Question is, do you have enough here indicating that these failures are not just one-off events?” He was looking for what he called “traceable cause.”

From the case reports that came in, Gioia built files, hundreds of them. He posted updates on a large bulletin board listing all the recalls that Ford had open at the time. Once a week, he would drive to the “chamber of horrors”—a huge depot a few miles from Ford’s headquarters, where all the problematic parts and vehicles were sent. His responsibility was to put cases on the “docket,” the slate of potential recalls. There were five people in the office. They would go through every case on the docket and vote on whether to send it to the executive committee.

“I was young, I was relatively low pay grade, but it was an extraordinarily powerful position, in the sense of being able to influence people to do things,” Gioia said. “If I picked up the phone and said, ‘This is Gioia from recall office,’ people jumped. I’m a twenty-six-year-old guy having people drop everything to respond to my requests.”

Gioia is a car guy. His everyday drive is a 2013 Porsche 911 S, and his weekend ride is a red 1979 Ferrari 308 GTS—the kind with an engine that can rattle windows. His first job was with Boeing’s aerospace division at Cape Kennedy, where he was part of the team that made sure the arms on the scaffolding that held the Apollo 11 and the Apollo 12 in place before liftoff retracted at precisely the right moment—because terrible things would happen if they didn’t. Gioia is capable and direct and intelligent, with the easy self-confidence of someone who has mastered mechanical things. The walls of his office are covered with pictures of Ferraris and memorabilia from NASA and the slide rule he used on the Apollo projects. He grew up in rural Pennsylvania and Florida: working-class parents, state schools all the way for engineering, and then business school. He was beloved at Ford. When he was recruited, someone in H.R. wrote “Crown Prince” across his file.

“One of the cases I inherited when I got the job had to do with speed-control devices,” Gioia recalled. At the time, they were regulated by a vacuum valve, which was failing in two of Ford’s most expensive cars, the Lincoln Mark IV and the Thunderbird. “The Thunderbird is a behemoth,” Gioia said. “It’s got a four-hundred-and-sixty-cubic-inch engine hanging out at the front. I mean, the hood is almost as long as the rest of the car. And nothing you could do from inside the car could slow it down. You’re supposed to be able to hit the brake and shut it off. Nope, won’t do it. Hit the switch. No, it won’t shut off. This thing is in the accel mode. It weighs forty-five hundred pounds—it’s almost a light truck. It’s driven by little old ladies from Pasadena and it’s on its way to a hundred miles an hour.

“The advice we got from the engineers was ‘Just tell the drivers to turn the ignition off.’ Well, then there’s no vacuum assist on the power brakes. Steering turns heavy. Ain’t nothing going on. So what would you rather have—somebody who can’t steer the car or stop the car or somebody who’s on his way to a hundred miles an hour? That’s a problem that’s going to kill someone.”

* * *

Here is a direct link to the complete article.

Malcolm Gladwell has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1996. He is the author of The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, and What the Dog Saw. Prior to joining The New Yorker, he was a reporter at the Washington Post. Gladwell was born in England and grew up in rural Ontario. He now lives in New York. To learn more about his work, please click here.