I drive along in my Jeep and now and again marvel at the bazillion pieces in it.
How many man hours went in to the design, drawings, renderings, steps to make ready for manufacturing, finding a contractor, casting it, coating it, polishing it, bagging it, tagging it, and shipping it to the assembly line for the lever I used to open the door.
Can you imagine being in the design meeting for that thing? 10 folks around a table, the buffet with scattered lunch trays on it, marking up white boards, feeling prototypes, discussing material costs and shipping and raw material availability. The feel of the curves, too big, too small, "needs to be upscale because of the market for the vehicle".
That's just one piece.
"Let me introduce the 'push-to-talk' button", rinse and repeat.
I appreciate that they're going to use the part for at least 5 years, that they're going to be making at least a million of these parts (making some decisions even more important, remember, every penny costs us $10,000!). And it's a touch item for the consumer, vs bracket under the car, that may receive a bit less scrutiny.
But there are 50-100,000 parts in that car. Not to mention the probably pushing million line of code in the dozen plus CPUs. My car has more computers than I do.
Then my mind swims, and I get a little dizzy, and think "I probably shouldn't be doing this at 80MPH", so I turn on baseball.
As somebody that works in cars and often have to design and manufacture custom parts the fact that they can make all those parts fit is the most incredible. I don’t recall a single time where something I designed that involved more than 3 parts at least one of them hadn’t to go back to the design stage to be re-manufactured.
How many man hours went in to the design, drawings, renderings, steps to make ready for manufacturing, finding a contractor, casting it, coating it, polishing it, bagging it, tagging it, and shipping it to the assembly line for the lever I used to open the door.
Can you imagine being in the design meeting for that thing? 10 folks around a table, the buffet with scattered lunch trays on it, marking up white boards, feeling prototypes, discussing material costs and shipping and raw material availability. The feel of the curves, too big, too small, "needs to be upscale because of the market for the vehicle".
That's just one piece.
"Let me introduce the 'push-to-talk' button", rinse and repeat.
I appreciate that they're going to use the part for at least 5 years, that they're going to be making at least a million of these parts (making some decisions even more important, remember, every penny costs us $10,000!). And it's a touch item for the consumer, vs bracket under the car, that may receive a bit less scrutiny.
But there are 50-100,000 parts in that car. Not to mention the probably pushing million line of code in the dozen plus CPUs. My car has more computers than I do.
Then my mind swims, and I get a little dizzy, and think "I probably shouldn't be doing this at 80MPH", so I turn on baseball.