Originally Posted by
Campag4life
Hush money.
But lets be clear what the level is here. Specialized isn't just shipping out replacement forks as most forks are likely OK. Specialized has already determined this so they don't want to needlessly spend money and replace all questionable forks manufactured down the same assembly line during the same time frame.. An owner will have his new SL4 pride and joy tied up for a while. Bike needs to be taken to the lbs, fork removed, boxed and shipped back to Specialized where each fork will likely be X-rayed to deduce carbon layup/section integrity/any presence of cracking. A determination will be made to replace or not. This is a lot cheaper for Specialized then just sending out replacement forks which would be more expeditous for owners. But this time delay has a risk for Specialized as well in terms of time containment and/or making a misdiagnosis on a fork that is returned...once a recall is known to the public, law suits will be more prevalent. This is all part of the careful calculus.
You obviously don't do a lot of shipping.
The cost to ship a completely boxed bike is 10x what it costs to ship a fork. Beyond the liability calculations (which are real) depending on the expected rate of failure it might be cheaper to just ship all new forks. But...
There is also the problem of actually producing enough forks to do a complete recall in a timely fashion. I've never made forks so I don't know what the capacity per day is for a fork mold, how many molds they own and how quickly they could produce enough forks to replace all the ones in question. I'm sure this calculation was done and factored in.
My point is that some may be reading too much into HOW they are handling the recall and that there may be other factors involved.