[bayindirh]

My professor is a materials/mechanical engineer and in contact with many auto companies. He told me of the following dialogue:

    Prof: Why did you stopped adding passenger side handles? How much one cost?
    CarGuy: Around €1.50
    Prof: That's not much?
    CarGuy: A new car leaves the factory every 60 seconds.
    Prof: Oh.

For the lazy, that's €2,160/Day, €64,800/Month, €777,600/year.

[jader201]

I guess, but still, these seemingly large numbers are still a minute percentage (e.g. probably 0.00001%) of overall costs/revenue that are relatively way, way more.

I would understand manufacturing pain, and the ROI just doesn't justify it. But saying that it's solely to do with costs doesn't line up, IMO.

[bayindirh]

For auto industry, that's big money. VW creates small inserts and adds them to their motor covers for Seat and Skoda. If you pry that logo, there's a molded VW logo on that plastic engine noise cover.

Stellantis shares tons of parts and software. Peugeot 2008 and Opel Mokka is essentially the same car. They share the same shifter, electronics and software stack sans the skin applied to displays and LCD geometry. Even 3008 has the same hardware with the same software. Heck, even the "lane hold" button is exactly the same one in all three cars. Same for parking brake switch, down to the blinking pattern of indicator LED. I bet all three use the same 8 gear auto gearbox, with different ratio sets, too.

After Fiat bought Chrysler, they started to use the same steering wheel in Dodge Charger and Fiat Tipo. Newer Fiats come with Mopar brakes and fluid subsystems (steering, cooling, etc.)

Key fobs are even funnier. In practice, every company uses the same key fob. A Lamborghini has the same fob with a VW Polo, sans the logo. Same for Stellantis group cars.

When you start to notice "chassis sharing" in commercial market vehicles, it stops being funny and starts to become ridiculous.

[kalleboo]

> Key fobs are even funnier

On Aston Martin key fobs, when the rubber coating wore off, it literally had the Volvo logo underneath. Ford parts bin.

[pram]

It also sometimes works out in your favor, especially for VW, since theres Audi and Porsche parts you can just slap on your GTI.

[bayindirh]

I know a guy who installed TT's magnetic active shocks to a Golf and got terrific results.

However, I'd rather have a boring car which I don't need to constantly maintain instead of an exciting one which needs a tune-up every weekend but that's just me.

It's not that I can't. It's rather I won't.

[ralferoo]

> CarGuy: Around €1.50

> I guess, but still, these seemingly large numbers are still a minute percentage (e.g. probably 0.00001%) of overall costs/revenue that are relatively way, way more.

Do you realise that your estimate, of €1.50 per car being 0.00001% of the costs, puts the manufacturing cost of a car at €15m?

[BHSPitMonkey]

You could almost get a new Rivian for that much.

[ilyt]

Why you think manufacturers went into touch surfaces in cars much to dissatisfaction (that eventually caused some to back up) of customers?

Every button needs a bit of plastic moulded, a (good quality) button, backlight, often LED to signal whether it is on or off, and whole control block needs microcontroller to pack it into CAN bus and CAN bus connector to send.

Make whole thing a touch surface and you're saving buck or two on buttons alone and your plastics don't need to articulate (another savings).

Move that to the touchscreen controls, and as screen is already there, more savings!

[somat]

Strictly speaking a touch screen is massively more complicated than a set of buttons. you now have billions of gates that have to be produced at nanometer scales in some of the most expensive factories on earth. The price to develop and manufacture a touch screen is many times that of a set of buttons. The fact that it is a generic interface drives the cost per unit down quite a bit. it does not hurt that the incredible manufacturing tolerances that must be maintained almost force the automation of the process allowing costs to be even lower.

I just wish we ended up with aircraft style MFD's instead of touch screens. You know those things with a screen and a row of buttons along each side.

[ilyt]

> The price to develop and manufacture a touch screen is many times that of a set of buttons.

It costs them $0 because consumers already expect a touch capable screen for infotaintment.

> I just wish we ended up with aircraft style MFD's instead of touch screens. You know those things with a screen and a row of buttons along each side.

Yeah it's a dream. Anything touch is annoying to use when driving. MFD-like also have advantage of being able to be touch typed, once you know in which menu you are it's always same sequence, and as those are physical buttons it's far harder to miss-press something.

[MichaelZuo]

> It costs them $0 because consumers already expect a touch capable screen for infotaintment.

Bingo, it would be a much different calculus if most potential customers didn't expect or want touch infotainment systems.

[bayindirh]

> Strictly speaking a touch screen is massively more complicated than a set of buttons.

But, it's a commodity item, produced in many more numbers w.r.t. a A/C temperature/fan encoder w/custom shape. A bog standard Renault Clio touchscreen is comparable to a good (not high, not top) quality Raspberry Pi screen you can get from RS or AdaFruit.

The screens on Opel Mokka I drove (it has two, one for dash, one for infotainment) were extremely good at sunlight, but the dash one was so small, around 7" IIRC, to control costs. So, even if they don't pay for R&D of the screen itself, the industry is so cost sensitive, that they will cut costs relentlessly to be able to sell more of these things at a lower cost and with higher profit margins.

Also, these LCD dashes has a couple of hidden LED indicator lights around to communicate fatal things in a failsafe manner.

Car manufacturers do not bear the CapEx required to develop these screens, but bear the CapEx required for developing and prototyping physical buttons.

> I just wish we ended up with aircraft style MFD's instead of touch screens. You know those things with a screen and a row of buttons along each side.

Industry is evolving on that direction now.

[paulmd]

kind of insane that a dollar here and there is significant on a $20k car (to premium vehicles like trucks/sports cars being $70-100k). but I guess $20k isn't the number that matters, it's $1 vs the profit margin of the vehicle which is of course much smaller.

[Cthulhu_]

But these factories scale. Second, it's only a single component that needs to be installed and tested, reducing labor costs and the number of components that could have an issue. It all adds up / someone's done the math.

[agos]

luckily software is free!

[graypegg]

Why wouldn’t cost be the sole or most important reason for cutting a non-safety, non-regulated feature?

700k in advertising would make a much bigger impact on revenue than 700k on door handles; unless people are that passionate about door handles that they go somewhere else.

Even if your current advertising budget is orders of magnitude larger, the force multiplier on investing in advertising is bigger than the door handle multiplier. So you’re just burning money.

Of course that’s all very cynical. Make the effort to reward companies that build the best product they can.

[lN5uhiNxWPBi]

I assume it can be hard to judge impact down the line. A lot of car manufacturers cut out physical buttons, which led for the current generation of horrible interfaces where everything is touch screen and you can’t even get a simple rotary knob for the volume.

My understanding is that this is now going back and car manufacturers are reverting this decision.

So yeah, why not spend the saved money on advertising? I don’t know the complexity of such decisions. There are some manufacturers that do take a stand not to cut as many corners. Over time they can become known for their design. Apple (at least until the mid 2010s) I’d say was one such company.

By the way, as was pointed out, £700k seems negligible to companies that size for something that might potentially torpedo a car if enough people hate that part and refuse to buy it based on those grounds. But I’m not an expert.

[graypegg]

Yeah that’s a good point. I guess in this case, there’s people whose job it is to figure out the value to the company of any decision that they make.

Sometimes they might think the higher end of the market is worth dominating by making the best product possible.

Other times that might be overkill.

It’s all very dependant on the company. Glad I don’t have to make those decisions! I just pretend to understand them on the internet heheh

[ilyt]

In case of buttons because of customer backlash many went back, like Honda.

[ghusto]

€777,600/year seems negligible for the industry.

[bayindirh]

That's only one handle. The part sharing between "sister" brands is beyond ridiculous. It adds up.

[Ekaros]

It is, but on other hand get one executive to present that and get extra 10% bonus because that... It makes sense to push for such change. Tangible numeric change you can present in your performance evaluation.

[Cthulhu_]

There it is; if I could go to my boss and say "I reduced our costs by three quarters of a million" there'd be a fat bonus for me. Possibly.

[rcpt]

Now ask CarGuy about dealer markups

[bayindirh]

In our country, dealers are not free to set their own prices like in the U.S. There's an official pricing list in the brand's website.

[eb0la]

Plus the time to install, which might make a car leave the factory every 60.07 seconds; which is much higher than the amount you receive.