‘We truly apologize’
Bombardier executive defends the quality of vehicles snagged by delays, recall
The president of Bombardier Transportation made his first appearance at the TTC board on Tuesday, and publicly apologized for the production problems that have forced a recall of the bulk of Toronto’s new streetcars.
At a meeting that also saw the board vote to appoint acting TTC CEO Rick Leary to the top job at the transit agency permanently, Benoit Brossoit, president of Bombardier Transportation for the Americas, made a presentation in which he said he came with other com- pany officials to demonstrate they are dealing with the streetcar problems “proactively, in full transparency.”
“First and foremost, we understand and share the disappointment of the mayor, the board and the TTC riders. And we truly apologize,” he said.
But he added that despite production problems and repeated delivery delays to the $1-billion order, “Bombardier stands by its product. Always, no compromise.”
“Issues like this are not uncommon in the industry. It does not make our cars bad,” he said, arguing the recall should be seen in the context of efforts the company has made in recent months to improve production.
Bombardier says it has invested $20 million in its Ontario plants in order to improve its delivery rate, and has spent $6 million to reinforce its global supply chain. The company also plans to start producing cars at a second facility in Kingston this fall to complement the factory in Thunder Bay where the vehicles are currently assembled.
Although TTC riders, the board and the mayor have all expressed extreme frustration with Bombardier’s manufacturing issues, the exchange between board members and company officials was mostly muted.
TTC Chair Josh Colle briefly pressed Brossoit on the need to deliver the new streetcars as promised. The agency has been keeping older vehicles on the streets for longer and replacing some streetcar service with buses while it waits for the new cars.
“I hope you realize how essential and important it is to get these streetcars on our streets as quickly as possible to serve our passengers,” Colle told Brossoit. He recommended Bombardier officials take a ride on “some of those crowded, leaky, beasts of streetcars that are serving our passengers right now” in order to experience the conditions customers are enduring. TTC board members voted back in 2015 to ask Bombardier executives attend their next meeting to explain delays to the streetcar order, but in an interview Tuesday Colle said until this week executives hadn’t taken up the invitation.
Colle said it was important for Brossoit to show up personally so that the public could see the company is “owning up” to the problems. But the TTC chair said words alone wouldn’t assure him Bombardier has the order on track.
“The only way we can really assess or judge them in an empirical way is their delivery rates,” he said.
After repeatedly missing earlier delivery targets, the company has done a better job this year sticking to a revised schedule.
As the Star first reported last week, Bombardier says that defects discovered in the welds of the new low-floor Flexity-model streetcars will force the company to take 67 of roughly 90 cars it has already delivered to Toronto out of service, and send them to Bombardier’s facility in La Pocatière, Quebec to be fixed.
It will take an estimated 19 weeks to ship and repair each car.
In order to minimize the effect on service, a small number of vehicles will be taken offline at a time. Bombardier expects it will take until 2022 to repair all 67.
Bombardier and the TTC both say the defects don’t pose a safety risk, and the company describes the repairs as “preventative maintenance” required to ensure the vehicles last their projected 30-year service life.
Bombardier’s chief operating officer David Van der Wee told the board that the production problems at the Mexican plant that produced the flaws have been rectified and the company’s “rigorous” control processes “should prevent any other issues of this nature.”
The company says the repair work won’t affect its ability to deliver all 204 cars by the agreed upon date of the end of 2019.
“The only way we can really assess or judge them ... is their delivery rates.” JOSH COLLE TTC CHAIR