[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.