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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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!
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.
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.
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.