Anybody Can Build a Bugatti
john posted in rides, technologies on November 29th, 2007
But only a few giant companies can build a Corolla.
In the automobile business, hitting the price/performance point could be more challenging than designing a great car. Sure, it takes dedication, some very smart designers, and trainloads of cash to design and build those few hundred Bugattis. But with a corporate conglomerate providing money and will, it’s just a matter of writing the checks. When it comes to designing to the requirements of a popular model, and turning out a million units that will be sold at a profit, that takes some intense organization, engineering, and timing. Alright, not any pencil pusher can design a supercar, but it’s easier than doing a $14,000 compact.
The legendary Bugatti is back, one of the three fastest cars in the world, hugely expensive and rare.
Bugatti Veyron
image from here
Toyota announced it will build 1.4 million of its econobox Corollas this year, world-wide.
2007 Corolla
image from here
I say the lowly Corolla is a much more difficult feat of engineering than the Bugatti. How can this be? Well here’s my point:
Although the Bugatti is complex, with many more parts than the Corolla and far higher performance, it has some design advantages over a car built for the millions.
cutaway turbocharged Veyron W16
image from here
First, let’s stipulate that the Bugatti is a very, very good car. It’s quiet, fast, comfortable and handles well. It has all the surface bits that sell luxury, and some carbon fiber and engine bits that sell performance. So what if I think its nouveau-riche ugly like a Coach purse or Harry Winston jewelry. It has to be flashy and unique, like a designer dress, a thing of status as much as performance. That is status is its measure of performance.
Veyron
images from here
On the other hand the Corolla is a workaday econobox, a pair of off-the-rack jeans compared to the Oscar-night dress that is the Bugatti.
The 2007 Corolla is a lot more complex than the original Corolla, but still it’s an entry-level car designed to master a viciously competitive market segment at a very low price point. There’s no money for turbos or carbon-fiber, there’s no room to carve a wind-tunnel influenced design. It has to run on lousy gasoline in Africa, in deserts and rainforests and in the Swedish winter. You have to be able to clean the seats with a damp cloth, change the oil at Jiffy Lube, and get tires, belts, wiper blades, and light bulbs anywhere. The factory has to turn them out by the millions with two or four doors, and they have to stay reliable and rust-free for several years of daily driving on Buffalo’s salted streets, in Timbuktu and New Dehli. The few coats of machine-applied paint have to look sharp at the dealer, and last for the life of the car, even though the car won’t often be washed and waxed. In a real sense performance determines the status factor of the Corolla - not how fast it goes, but how cheap it is to run and maintain. Yet it has to compete in the showroom with dozens of other models.
Corolla engine bay showing thrifty 4 banger
image from here
The Bugatti has to look great, drive great, and carry its uber-status with aplomb. It would be a crime to drive one in the snow, to park it in the city, to leave it outdoors overnight. Nobody would touch the paint with a sponge, drop ice cream on the seats, or feed it anything but premium gas. Mechanics will speak gently to it. Maintenance and repair schedules can be done like an airplane with regular replacement before parts wear out, cost be damned.
The 16 cylinder Veyron motor
No inept teenager will bounce it off a curb, no hapless brother-in-law will get it stuck in a muddy field, no tow-truck will ever get a hook near it. Most of all, it will never be driven hard. But lots of third-owners will redline that Corolla back and forth to school while running dubious oil in the engine and ignoring the water temperature. The Bugatti will be driven with a velvet foot, with occasional forays into the three digit range on back roads. Mostly it will sit and get polished in a really nice air-conditioned garage. If a million-dollar car requires $30,000 in annual maintenance, then so be it. If anything at all fails on the Toyota in the first 100,000 miles, the company risks a bad reputation spread across the Internet, and billions in annual sales.
The Corolla will be driven for two hundred thousand miles or more in fifteen or twenty years before it goes to the crusher. The Bugatti will never see 30,000 miles, though it will likely be maintained forever in a museum.
So why is it harder to design the Toyota than the Bugatti? Imagine you are in charge of the windshield wiper motor on both cars:
On the Bugatti team, you go to the high-end supplier and tell them you want the best; they quote you a price at 20x what Toyota pays for a Corolla unit; you buy a few and test them; you go back and forth trying exotic materials until they are light enough and seem to be durable and fit. The price goes up 100%.
On the Toyota team you talk to the two or three suppliers and tell them you want a better wiper motor than the last model, that weighs less and costs less. You go back and forth tweaking the alloy of the base plate, shrinking the electronics, improving the weather-tightness and bearings. In the end, you have to decide for every component part whether you’ll trade a 2% weight loss for a 5% decrease in reliability versus a 5% increase in price. The boss sweeps in and says to cut 10% off the price and still make it a better wiper motor, so you try another supplier. After you settle on the design, then you tweak it so the plant robots will be able to pick it up and insert the bolts, not too tight, not too sloppy. You consider eliminating the fourth bolt in favor of three bigger ones, to save a couple of seconds and a few grams. Somebody has to decide whether bolts with pre-formed washers are cheaper than bolts with separate washers, then you look at sharing bolts with the Camry because it saves a part number across a million cars. Oh by the way, the suppliers have to be able to reliably drop 1,000 pre-tested units every day on the loading dock at the time your plant foreman determines, in five different countries.
At the end of the Bugatti design, the final prototype of the car weighs 200 kilos more than planned, a bit more than, say, the Ferrari Enzo. So you swap out all the big steel chassis bolts for titanium, and increase the turbo boost 1 lb to get another 50 hp, add ostrich leather as an option, and call it a supercar.
At the end of the Corolla design, you sweat the last 2 mpg on the US EPA mileage tests. Meetings are taken to decide on adjusting the software to get a better score versus rough idling in cold climates. Those wiper motors had better install in the 30 seconds allotted, or you may never make engineering manager. Then they tell you CO2 will now be measured as part of the emissions test.
Obviously I am making hypothetical examples, but you see how it is possible to trade money for organization and planning, up to a point. If building each Bugatti costs 100 more man-hours than planned, that’s only a few thousand dollars per car across a few hundred very expensive cars; if each Toyota costs 1 more man-hour, that’s millions of dollars. In the supercar you just have to get 1000 hp, a number not so difficult in a modern engine of very large displacement, where cost and cost of maintenance is not a factor. But in the econobox you have to make it more reliable than the supercar using cheap plastic and stamped metal parts and a lot less assembly time. For the Toyota, you also have to design the assembly process down to the second, scrimping on each failed part, bad fit, and human motion. If the Bugatti assembly guys take Friday afternoon off, well it really doesn’t matter to the profitability ( or more likely losses) of the car model. Suppose you decide to give away custom $10,000 his and hers watches with each Bugatti. The extra media play you get from the stunt might sell two more cars, making it worth doing. if you gave away a $10 Casio with each Corolla, it would cost $14million, and that would require selling an extra 14,000 cars ( at a guesstimated $1000 profit per Corolla) just to break even on the raw cost.
So paradoxically it’s easier to make an ultra-expensive supercar, than your everyday automotive appliance.
What’s the Point?
The next time you hear the electric car club griping about how long it takes to get an automotive juggernaut to change course, remember what it is they actually do all day long in engineering. Now consider that Toyota is famously the most agile carmaker on the planet. They spend fewer man-hours building a car and design them in a shorter time than anyone. And they make buckets of money. Now imagine what it’s like getting cash-poor old and inept GM to change course.
When you hear some upstart company claiming it can build an econobox from scratch using new drive-train technology, when it has never built a gas car, hold onto your wallet. Notice how Tesla, the Lithium battery-electric automotive startup is beginning with a $100,000 supercar, the two-seat Roadster. They aim at the Hollywood set, where the car will be a green status symbol and get lots of attention.
But when you hear that Tata in India will produce a $3000 gas car, or that multiple Chinese companies plan on making hybrid econoboxes in two years, give it some thought. They don’t compete with Toyota or Honda or even Saturn, and they have a huge home market hungry for cars. They are perfectly willing to blatantly copy parts off Japanese cars, intellectual property be damned. Their markets are emerging and expectations are lower, the companies are establishing a beachhead in the market, and quality improvements are planned for later.
It’s all about leveling the playing field of the market: in Europe and the West customers demand very high levels of reliability and function, and many carmakers vie for their business. Emissions and crash requirements are still stricter than in India and China or the Third World. So if you want carmakers in the developed world to make greener cars, you have to give them a level playing field, or wait a long time until the market develops.
Sure we can get the big OEMs to go greener, but if you want them to do it faster, and I do, then you have to understand what it is they can and can’t do. Carmakers have huge fixed costs, huge payrolls, office overhead, land and energy costs. Yet they have to plan two to four years ahead to sell a car which they hope will be popular, against smart rivals, in a world market where wholesale oil just doubled in cost.
If you don’t take into account the actual costs of being a carmaker, then your public green transportation policy is doomed. On the other hand, if we had listened to the whining of the Big Three carmakers in the 80’s, we would still have choking yellow air in Los Angeles, and no airbags. The difference is the level playing field. Set them a reasonable standard, convince them that the standard is permanent, and let the market and the engineers work out the details.
Some References
The Stalwart
Fast Company
Car Connection
A proper artisan Bugatti, just for visual reference….
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