The embarassment I remember was in the bus business. Santa Cruz had just gotten some brand new Grumman buses, complete with wheelchair lifts. In testing, they had been troublesome, but the one they sent out for a promo tour with the Board members (one of whom was in a wheelchair) had been checked out and everything worked. It did; everybody got on and they went to their meeting. When they got to their stop, everybody but the wheelchair user got off - the lift broke. Oops. In semi-fairness (those buses were a problem for nearly every system that had them), those were early days for wheelchair lifts and a lot of other gadgets we expect routinely now, and they've gotten a lot more reliable.

IIRC (it was a very long time ago), Santa Cruz also had a small group of the long version of those buses. They were recalled after several in Chicago broke frame members (one might have actually broken in half) and some cracks were found in Santa Cruz's buses. Santa Cruz was happy that they still had their some of their old GMs around to put back into service.