Probably not expensive to implement, but if you’re building a lot of them, I imagine the ~4cents per unit (maybe more, just guessing) adds up fast.
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.
However, I'd rather have a boring car which I don't need to constantly maintain instead of an exciting one which needs a tune-up every weekend but that's just me.
It's not that I can't. It's rather I won't.
On Aston Martin key fobs, when the rubber coating wore off, it literally had the Volvo logo underneath. Ford parts bin.
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.
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
> 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.
But, it's a commodity item, produced in many more numbers w.r.t. a A/C temperature/fan encoder w/custom shape. A bog standard Renault Clio touchscreen is comparable to a good (not high, not top) quality Raspberry Pi screen you can get from RS or AdaFruit.
The screens on Opel Mokka I drove (it has two, one for dash, one for infotainment) were extremely good at sunlight, but the dash one was so small, around 7" IIRC, to control costs. So, even if they don't pay for R&D of the screen itself, the industry is so cost sensitive, that they will cut costs relentlessly to be able to sell more of these things at a lower cost and with higher profit margins.
Also, these LCD dashes has a couple of hidden LED indicator lights around to communicate fatal things in a failsafe manner.
Car manufacturers do not bear the CapEx required to develop these screens, but bear the CapEx required for developing and prototyping physical buttons.
> 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.
Industry is evolving on that direction now.
It costs them $0 because consumers already expect a touch capable screen for infotaintment.
> 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.
Yeah it's a dream. Anything touch is annoying to use when driving. MFD-like also have advantage of being able to be touch typed, once you know in which menu you are it's always same sequence, and as those are physical buttons it's far harder to miss-press something.
Bingo, it would be a much different calculus if most potential customers didn't expect or want touch infotainment systems.
The real question is why does your microwave gives time in the first place. Sounds like they had a display and didn't know what to show on it while the microwave wasn't actively used, I'd say drop the clock altogether
The clock was an upsell long ago, but now that the whole device is a commodity product, and the clock is using parts already in the machine, I guess it’s just not worth removing.
That said, do these radio signals contain the exact time for that timezone or is it more of a synchronization signal that goes "it is now exactly 0 minutes, 0 seconds" once an hour? Since the image shows that the signal crosses some timezone boundaries.
And they are too cheap to even put a capacitor in to cover for most short power failures