In early 2023, Keysight predicted that recalls would increase steadily between 2023 and 2026 as product developers rushed to fill supply chain gaps. Sedgwick’s 2024 State of the Nation Recall Index report proved this prediction is coming true, with recalls reaching a seven-year high in 2023, up 11% over already high 2022 levels.

New recall announcements in the first quarter of 2024 highlight an alarming number of product failures, from the airline industry rocked by a series of incidents to design and maintenance concerns with electric vehicles.

This is happening for several reasons, the largest of which are due to the convergence of multiple technologies, each with its own feature evolution and supply chain issues, coming together into a single product. In physics, this is known as multidimensional acceleration, where the rate of change accelerates across multiple aspects simultaneously.

In product development, OEMs for larger things like automobile and aircraft manufacturers rely on suppliers to deliver pre-integrated, often preassembled subsystems. These integrated subsystems are notoriously difficult to assess from a quality and reliability standpoint using noninvasive quality assurance methods.