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Products and services must be provided without jeopardizing safety for end-users. It is a fact that failures that compromise the health or safety of the user of the product (or with other people that interact with it) are recognized as one of the biggest problems for any manufacturer, mainly if these failures are identified after the product sales which leads to the necessity of the recall, where the manufacturer is responsible for a corrective action under the country’s legislation. In this work, the reasons and causes of the automotive recall were studied from 2011 to 2019, with emphasis on failures resulting from the production process. This research comprised all models and brands of national and or imported vehicles marketed in Brazil in the period, which represented a total of 886 Brazilian automotive recalls were studied individually, and 13,930,803 motor vehicles involved in recalls.

The automotive industry, like so many others, is naturally competitive. Minor errors and differences result not only in monetary losses or gains, but also in impacts that are difficult to measure, such as customer confidence in products of a certain brand, or even its reputation. Among the small differences directly at work after sales is the “invisible” action of legislation of a particular place regarding consumer rights. In order to analyze different legislation guidelines in the event of failures, this work will present the correlation between automotive recalls, call of vehicles carried out in an organized manner after the presentation of abnormal behavior due to the probable error occurred in the assembly or manufacture of the automobile, and the different laws of three regions of interest: Brazil, United States of America and the European Union.

In an effort to reduce time to market, cut costs, eliminate late engineering changes, improve product quality and the profit, among others, a Brazilian automobile industry decided implement the production preparation process in a new product process development inside the year of 2007. The Toyota industry worldwide development makes the use of lean manufacturing methodology, being disseminate in the worldwide industry. This work intends to show lean manufacturing and one of the most innovative and advanced Lean Enterprise Methods tool, the pre-production planning, also known as production preparation process or 3P. This paper presents a real study of case, and the final earnings obtained with the production preparation process tool.

The use of modal analysis and neural networks is proposed to detect damages in parts and structures. Comparing the natural frequencies of a test structure with the ones of a non-damaged structure, a neural net, using its capabilities in recognize standards, can deliver the location and extension of the probable damages. Two examples are presented. At the first one, a notch is located on a free-free beam. The second example deals with a truss-like tower where the damage is a loss of stiffness in some structural members. The results obtained point as very promising the use of neural network as computational tool in nondestructive testing.