so it’s fair to check whether it is a model specific issue first.
Agreed. And easily done by any of Alstom's customers.
And not to pick on Alstom or Bombardier, as the TTC's streetcars seem to be working well. I proudly show off our new streetcars to anyone who visits TO, and every time I see the Crosstown running on test my heart leaps a little in anticipation of riding the system and of how it will positively transform Eglinton east of Laird. I foresee massive residential growth in the Golden Mile area thanks to this new system. I'm a Crosstown fan through and through. Just get the damn thing running.
A note on mergers and acquisitions. The reason you acquire a company is to increase profit and reduce competition. Once acquired, the new owner must push for synergies, efficacies and cost cutting by consolidating sales, administration, R&D, QA, manufacturing, procurement, parts, and logistics. As mentioned above, vehicles produced before the merger will have no common parts, so any failures in Ottawa do not impact Bombardier's pre-merger vehicles. It's after any merger where we can expect to see consideration of design changes to allow for commonality of components between newly merge companies. If a future Metrolinx order of Flexity streetcars for the TTC does not have some cost-cutting shared corporate components then the merger has failed Alstom's shareholders.
I have experienced this directly in my own career in construction products, where we acquired a competitor's power tool brand and factory, and our engineers and accountants quickly got to work to consolidate the two distinct firms, introducing design changes so that the acquired brand would use our control modules and components even though final assembly remained at the acquired firm's original factory, resulting in little outward change visible to the customers or market. The customer would say,
"yes our favourite brand was acquired, but it's still made at factory X and not at the new owner's plant Y, so our trust in the original brand is assured". Meanwhile our accountants and engineers continued to creep forward, to the point that within five years there was little distinction between the two brands other than the exterior cases and stickers.
In this light I think it would be understandable for Metrolinx to ask Alstom if the bearing issue is isolated to Ottawa's system or if those components or QA processes have been propagated across their network.