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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

And that route is pretty much closed today. If you want to go and re-do the Japanese path starting with motorcycles and then working your way up through simple cars and then more and more luxurious and complex versions then today's 'simple' car is much more complex than the simple cars that Japan started out with. The barrier to entry is much higher than it was in the 50's and the 60's, this goes for any manufacturer. Witness the amount of crap leveled at Tesla for fit-and-finish when none of that would have even been a footnote for a new car launch several decades ago.

Just for a reminder of how bad it really was: at the end of the British Leyland body assembly line men with large hammers would whack the doors from below to make them close properly. Body panels were simply not made to the same standard that they are today and people didn't care that much about such stuff.

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There is argument that it's easier to build car now than in 60ies because car parts manufacturing was decentralized in 90ies. In 60ies vertically integrated car companies dominated market and you could not buy car parts at any price if those companies did not want to sell them to you. Now most parts are produced by third parties (that often used to be part of fully integrated car company like Delphi Technologies) and you can build modern car like legos, outsource pretty much everything and only do final assembly. Still not easy (30k+ parts in every car) but doable.

It’s a bit interesting in that because Chinese factories rely a lot more on human labor and less on automation, quality suffers significantly. A Toyota, Audi, or Honda simply isn’t the same level of car in the mainland as it is elsewhere.

Interesting, this is the first time I came across this. Do you have source that factories operated by Toyota, Audi, Honda etc. in China are different in operation by design from their home countries?

They are all done by 49/51 JVs, so it isn’t Toyota making the cars, it is GAC Toyota. My observations are all anecdotal and shared by Chinese colleagues when I was working in China. They are starting aggressive programs to automate (e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/12/business/a-robot-revoluti...) and quality should improve over time.

Note that it doesn’t really bother most people because while the defect rate is higher, the mechanics to fix those problems are cheaper as well.

>at the end of the British Leyland body assembly line men with large hammers would whack the doors from below to make them close properly.

Not that your point about inherent complexity doesn't stand but having to whack body panels to make them fit just means the dies are at the end of their lives. They certainly would have fit without mechanical persuasion when the dies were new. The hood of any late 90s International S-series is a good example of this.

There is a reason why almost all British car companies went out of business.

That was partly Lucas Electric, which somehow managed to dominate UK car electrics in the 1950s and 1960s using technology from the 1930s.

Oh don't get me started. I rebuilt a bunch of Mini's from scratch.

Yeah, but using sheet sheet metal dies that were on death's doorstep wasn't it. Plenty of other companies did that back in the day.

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