Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A Company That Tears Cars Apart to Find Out How They're Built

jalopnik.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 134 posts

Re: A Company That Tears Cars Apart to Find Out How They're Built

#11

Post by Hasz »

I'm amazed they sell all that info for just $150,000. I figure there's around ~125 major automakers in the world, maybe a dozen or two or so big enough to own their own labs. For each 23,000 page document, we're only taking ~15M, max. For a team of manufacturing experts, this just isn't that much cash.

I suspect a majority of their cash flow comes from those training seminars, and the $150K book is just to get you in the door and interested.

I would love to see a breakdown of their revenue.

Re: A Company That Tears Cars Apart to Find Out How They're Built

#12

Post by devy »

Luc wrote: post #9

A fun comparison: Munro on the BMW i3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqiBWfsDTAA Munro on the Tesla Model 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCIo8e12sBM

Oh man! Munro is brutally honest in his assessment of manufacturing excellence :) The contrast makes me chuckle.

Re: A Company That Tears Cars Apart to Find Out How They're Built

#14

Post by Spooky23 »

traek wrote: post #8
ethbro wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of that transfer was explicitly driven by government policy. If you're ever around the Beijing airport, you'll notice a mushroom patch of well-known non-Chinese companies' facilities. The one constant? More security around the buildings than a military base. I'm not one to beat the US / European nationalistic gong, but it's a fact that the Chinese government has specifically targeted foreign industries to force…

How has China forced companies into tech transfer? Nobody forces them to manufacture in China.

But the PRC can prevent them from selling in China. Shareholders care about the quarterly results. Nobody cares about the company a few years on.

The Chinese have a long view on this stuff. If you put out an engineering RFP, you can be sure that Chinese companies and government are probably the biggest web consumers of your content.

Re: A Company That Tears Cars Apart to Find Out How They're Built

#16

Post by devy »

vinceguidry wrote: post #3

This is the sort of thing that makes my eyes roll and my attention wander whenever politicos hammer on about the loss of our manufacturing base being America's imminent downfall. The amount of institutional knowledge baked into our industries is simply mind-boggling. The only reason we can get away with outsourcing manufacturing in the first place is because this knowledge is so amazingly thorough.

Munro & Associates wants to sell these automobile tear-down reports to China so much that they even translated their marketing materials into Chinese :)

http://leandesign.com/bmwi3-videos-chinese/

Re: A Company That Tears Cars Apart to Find Out How They're Built

#17

Post by devy »

sxates wrote: post #15
Luc wrote: post #9

A fun comparison: Munro on the BMW i3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqiBWfsDTAA Munro on the Tesla Model 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCIo8e12sBM

One of those companies is a multi-million dollar client for them, and one is not.

I suspected that as well - but any hints of evidence?

To be fair though, Tesla's manufacturing quality does indeed falling behind their targeted segment majorly. Like Munro said, even Kia makes better assembly these days (without uneven gaps etc.) But yes, have a paid contract for product promotion doesn't hurt

Re: A Company That Tears Cars Apart to Find Out How They're Built

#18

Post by mywittyname »

Hasz wrote: post #11

I'm amazed they sell all that info for just $150,000. I figure there's around ~125 major automakers in the world, maybe a dozen or two or so big enough to own their own labs. For each 23,000 page document, we're only taking ~15M, max. For a team of manufacturing experts, this just isn't that much cash. I suspect a majority of their cash flow comes from those training seminars, and the $150K book is just to get you in…

They don't just sell to major auto makers. Governments are a huge customer. OEM suppliers are another big one, they don't buy the comprehensive reports, just component reports.

I heard the owner/chief engineer give a talk a while ago, specifically about the i3, and he said the report was originally priced at $500k for the full thing. So it's possible that the price of these reports drop with age.

Edit: they also do perform costing on a contract basis. So an OEM will actually pay them to tear down a competitor vehicle, and Munro reserves the rights to sell that report too.

Re: A Company That Tears Cars Apart to Find Out How They're Built

#19

Post by ramy_d »

what about software? I'm reminded of what farmers have to go through with John Deere tractors [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8JCh0owT4w]. Isn't that going to start happening with cars (I thought this was already happening). Are they going to reverse engineer that too?

Re: A Company That Tears Cars Apart to Find Out How They're Built

#20

Post by plantain »

com2kid wrote: post #10
ggg9990 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have transferred a TON of this institutional knowledge to China. Now companies like DJI can compete and beat us, and it’s all with knowledge that we transferred to them in the last 30 years.

> Now companies like DJI can compete and beat us DJI hires high quality Chinese engineers. Their software is better than what American consumer drone companies manage to push out, and they can push the latest tech to market insanely quick, as GoPro learned the hard way when they found out DJI was a half generation ahead of them on drone tech. DJI has great customer service, an amazing insurance plan that provides pie…

This is patently untrue - DJI has some of the worst customer service I have ever experienced, especially for a 1000$ device. I spent two months calling every other day trying to resolve a hardware issue and ended up issuing a chargeback before getting any attention.

Go read the DJI hardware/software support forums.

Never. Again.

Post reply on HN