[YouWhy]

I would not expect RR to be particularly high quality, due to:

1. Small production batches,

2. Low typical usage - most RR owners do not use it to commute on a daily basis, hence do not face high reliability requirements,

3. The ability of the typical buyer to overspend on maintenance, whether preemptively or on-demand.

[Scoundreller]

Rolls Royces are becoming reshelled BMW mechanics and electronics.

Check this out where the clock spring is the same as a bmw part and just the knobs are fancier (and swappable!):

https://www.reddit.com/r/Justrolledintotheshop/comments/18m5...

[gocartStatue]

Small production batches are absolutely required for high quality (see Toyota, TQM)

[dehrmann]

But there isn't enough overall volume to ever get the kinks worked out.

[MichaelZuo]

That's only if they don't QC every single part, for every single car, coming from new suppliers.

Which RR would do to avoid the obvious problem, only after a supplier has been verified to be sending only the highest quality product, would they ease off.

The simplest thing is that the supplier charges double or triple the unit price such that they can accept half the parts failing inspection and getting sent back.

[dehrmann]

It's more than just QC. When you make 3M cars per year, you get a lot of data points about what fails, and you you feed that back into new designs. You also nail manufacturing tolerances. When you make 4,000 (and a lot of those won't see the same mileage as a Honda), there aren't as many opportunities to find these issues.

Or another way: you an QC a bolt to death, but that doesn't tell you if it's undersized for the design.

[MichaelZuo]

Yes it does when there are several stages of prototypes and engineering builds before the actual production vehicle is shipped to customers... and the hundreds of other mechanisms and systems that major automakers use nowadays. I mentioned QC because it's the first screening for arriving parts, not the only thing that occurs.

Do you not know how car manufacturing works?

Anyways you don't have to take the quality of RR parts on my word if you still think it's impossible, just go a showroom and inspect it yourself.

[YouWhy]

Design iteration is typically a long tail phenomenon - new issues keep coming up as the system (car) faces new scenarios.

Even a high-resource prototyping program can only go so far with scenarios like - wear and tear/part fatigue, adverse environmental conditions, local peculiarities (e.g. regulatory requirements for uncommon configurations), unintended but common maintenance mistakes etc.

For example, a Fiat car my family owned suffered a cascade drivetrain failure after about 9 years on the road. I don't think a prototyping program could have captured that ahead of time.

The fact that the showroom RR parts look fine only indicates that the parts are ok immediately after manufacturing; it does not promise they'll work fine after several years even if treated will.