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by bsilvereagle
3928 days ago
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> competition buying a bunch of VW cars to take them apart would be an invitation for VW to sue them for willful patent infringement and the accompanying treble damages. As someone noted above, every auto manufacturer is buying the competitor's cars, tearing them down, figuring out they work, rebuilding them, and benchmarking. The last point is key - you can run your internal tests against their vehicles and see how you compare in your tests. You can also get a feel for how many molds/stamps/etc that your competitor has in their factory by looking at the mold IDs. You can figure out how tight their weld tolerances are by X-Ray'ing the welds. There is a wealth of information inside a competitor's product that goes beyond the IP. |
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Also known as the German Tank Problem[0]
Allied intelligence, trying to estimate the extent of Panzer production, used estimates based on serial numbers of various components in tanks that fell into their hands.
From Wikipedia: "Estimating production was not the only use of this serial number analysis. It was also used to understand German production more generally, including number of factories, relative importance of factories, length of supply chain (based on lag between production and use), changes in production, and use of resources such as rubber."
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem