quote:

Originally posted by Aglifter:
OK. I get what you mean, in a way, but that’s technique, not process.

Might not translate outside of mechanical devices.

Germans might have an obsession with making things small?

Not sure. The device I mentioned would have needed to be a small amount larger - vast void left in the envelope. Definitely could have enlarged it. Making it compact didn’t really save any operating cost, but I supposed used a tiny bit less steel.

Process is also completely different from what it was when I started in Engineering and has changed continuously for the entire time I was working.

Originally we designed in Analog.

Then when we went to digital we went to digital sequential for a while, then microprocessors came out and we changed the process again and since then we've changed a few more times.

Electronic engineering requires continuing education for as long as you work.

quote:

Originally posted by Ripley:
I had a passing familiarity with Brit motor vehicles as younger guy, they more fiddly than they should be. As I encountered other Brit engineering over the years, things seemed more complicated and less effective than necessary. I passed it off to the product of nook and cranny minds coming from a nook and cranny country.

Referring to Lucas Electrics?
My experience was limited to BSA and Triumph motorcycles of the 1960’s so your results may have varied.

Positive grounding when the rest of the world used negative grounds?

Using a floating ground system instead of chassis ground for components and the battery?

quote:

Originally posted by shovelhead:

quote:

Originally posted by Ripley:
I had a passing familiarity with Brit motor vehicles as younger guy, they more fiddly than they should be. As I encountered other Brit engineering over the years, things seemed more complicated and less effective than necessary. I passed it off to the product of nook and cranny minds coming from a nook and cranny country.

Referring to Lucas Electrics?
My experience was limited to BSA and Triumph motorcycles of the 1960’s so your results may have varied.

Positive grounding when the rest of the world used negative grounds?

Using a floating ground system instead of chassis ground for components and the battery?

Where I lived, Lucas was referred to as "the Prince of Darkness" as a reference to the reliability of their lighting systems.

quote:

Originally posted by nhtagmember:
good, cheap, fast

pick 2

American's are impatient, and want things yesterday

and are always looking for the lowest price on everything

And other things being equal, to their own demise, as the old saying goes, you get what you pay for.

I don't know about that stuff, but the Italians make great target shotguns, the Swedes make great cutting axes and hatchet steels, and Americans make great F150s. I don't know how it works but it does. But a mechanic said that Germans over engineer Merecedes Benz cars, like an expensive sensor that goes out and costs lots of money to replace, to tell you your fucking trunk lightbulb is out. God bless German engineers but wtf ? This mechanic said Mercedes cars are nice if you can drive them five years and replace them with new ones, otherwise forgettaboutit in regards to maintenance. I tbought that was pretty telling, at least in my puny mind. I wonder why Germans don't put astronauts in space, there's probably something to that dontcha think ?

all the talk of German car engineering , cost etc, and yet the 3rd world and parts of europe use them for taxi's like we use old police cars,



my English built, German owned Mini Cooper S had a French built motor and a Japanese built Transmission,



I was told long ago that Walmart, Sears etc would contract a company to make whatever, firearms, lawn equipment, etc to a price point,

as in they want a mower with these features at this price, delivered,

so the engineers would cut corners or delete options to meet that price point,

I daily drive the snot out of an 18-year-old German hooptie. (0-62 mph in 3.2)

Bosch versus Lucas

People are just bloviating in this thread about knowing a guy, who knew a guy, who maybe once saw someone own a German car.

NEWSFLASH: they all cost money

quote:

Originally posted by wrightd:
And other things being equal, to their own demise, as the old saying goes, you get what you pay for.

That used to be true of everything but these days it's only true of some things.

There are a bunch of other things where people are making a ton of money by counting on people believing that the most expensive is the best, even when it's not.

quote:

Originally posted by Flash-LB:

quote:

Originally posted by wrightd:
And other things being equal, to their own demise, as the old saying goes, you get what you pay for.

That used to be true of everything but these days it's only true of some things.

There are a bunch of other things where people are making a ton of money by counting on people believing that the most expensive is the best, even when it's not.

Can you say Gucci?

I can say with high confidence that designs, even today, from the area that was once West Germany are far different from designs that are from the area which was once East Germany.

Night and day. The 2 areas are slowing merging, but they are still a ways from it.

quote:

Originally posted by lyman:
I was told long ago that Walmart, Sears etc would contract a company to make whatever, firearms, lawn equipment, etc to a price point,

as in they want a mower with these features at this price, delivered,

so the engineers would cut corners or delete options to meet that price point,

That’s pretty much the essence of most engineering design. Anybody can design something overbuilt and expensive.

Designing to some balance of the minimum weight, size, cost, complexity, etc, necessary to meet the design requirements is what is hard (usually).

We've driven Mercedes-Benz diesels sedans and station wagons since 1978. The built-in-Germany kind. The one only kink in the road was a ML350 SUV that we owned for around four years, in addition to my 380SL. It was built in Alabama and while it was not a disaster, it was substantially less well-built than the German version, which in any case, is build in Graz, Austria.

We are now on our third E-Class station wagon, and about to head off to North Wales for the weekend. I fully expect to find that we've averaged around 54 miles per gallon, quite usual for a modern M-B diesel, even what is, by European standards, a large and complex vehicle.

My other German car, an older Porsche Boxster, is about to be replaced by another German car.

quote:

Originally posted by lyman:

I was told long ago that Walmart, Sears etc would contract a company to make whatever, firearms, lawn equipment, etc to a price point,

as in they want a mower with these features at this price, delivered,

so the engineers would cut corners or delete options to meet that price point,

That's how every good business does it these days.

1. Identify a product segment
2. Determine total market for that product segment
3. Project company's share of the total market
4. Do market research on what features people want and how much they would pay
5. Determine the unit price people are willing to pay, net out gross margin to get the standard cost which includes factory overhead. Net out the allocated unit factory overhead from the standard cost to get the cost of good for each unit.
6. Give the list of features to the engineers to figure out how to make product without exceeding the cost of goods target.

quote:

Originally posted by Rey HRH:

quote:

Originally posted by lyman:

I was told long ago that Walmart, Sears etc would contract a company to make whatever, firearms, lawn equipment, etc to a price point,

as in they want a mower with these features at this price, delivered,

so the engineers would cut corners or delete options to meet that price point,

That's how every good business does it these days.

1. Identify a product segment
2. Determine total market for that product segment
3. Project company's share of the total market
4. Do market research on what features people want and how much they would pay
5. Determine the unit price people are willing to pay, net out gross margin to get the standard cost which includes factory overhead. Net out the allocated unit factory overhead from the standard cost to get the cost of good for each unit.
6. Give the list of features to the engineers to figure out how to make product without exceeding the cost of goods target.

That's probably true for consumer goods, but I worked primarily in Medical Electronics and there we were given a list of things it had to be and do and told to go at it. Cost was never part of the deal.

I find it interesting that the Korean car manufacturers, Hyundai and Kia (both part of the same combine) are out to eat everyone's lunch.
They have hired the best engineers from Germany (BMW I believe) who are now designing cars that will match or beat the major European marques (to use that snooty word) at a lower cost and with better reliability and lower maintenance costs. The Kia Stinger, Genesis G70, and now with electrics the Hyundai Ioniq 5/Kia KV6 twins. They are actually starting to make cars that are exciting to look at, fun to drive, and won't break the bank.

I've had a few drinks so I apologize if this is a bit rambling.

My experience of a career as a mechanical engineer in industrial manufacturing doesn't really resonate with much of this thread.

I suppose if you're talking about cars and certain segments of consumer goods, but as someone that deals with worldwide manufacturing and sourcing, dealing with these actual engineers; it's more of a company culture that shapes things in the way you're talking more than it is the background and citizenship of the engineers. Though the engineers themselves (ourselves?) do present in their own cultural stereotypes.

GM hiring a lot more Chinese, Indian, Pakistani, and other "cheap" MS engineers didn't produce a large shift in the quality of product because the slow mechanations of the behemoth corporation and the management not really getting cultural penetration. But Tesla, who bootstrapped itself without really carving into and cannibalizing other automotive companies did a lot of its work without that existing knowledge of how to build a good car and it shows with a lot of their decisions and how the end product turned out - now that they're more strongly partnered with Germans and have a German division and factory it will be interesting to see if the euro market ends up with a much higher build quality and well-appointed features as the benchmark is a lot higher there.

But automotive aside, Toyota has probably had the biggest impact on engineering culture of the last few decades. Their LEAN and JIT shaped a lot of the horizontal alignment in manufacturing supply chain, which is one of the primary reasons we're in such a state with supply chain these days.

And while we're on the subject - one of the biggest cultural differences I'm aware of between Asia, Europe, and US engineers is the relationship between levels of authority. In Asian cultures it is uncouth for the boss to be wrong, regardless of how wrong he is- you work regardless and if it fails it's his failure, not yours no matter your contribution (one of the reasons Asians take more measured steps in engineering, fear of failure when responsible, one of the reasons you have giant recalls on safety systems like airbags - no one said shit when they knew they shipped bad product). Europeans tend to be more stratified and have some kind of tiered system I'm not too familiar with, but it's a somewhat shared system of career progression based on mostly tenure of the position - but it leads to people who are very much not qualified holding important decision making positions because they've been around forever not because they're any good at all.

The way in which decisions and accountability roll down through a company has a direct correlation on quality, and I'm sure the experiences I've seen aren't limited to engineering departments in companies, though it's not always the case.

quote:

Originally posted by Flash-LB:

quote:

Originally posted by Rey HRH:

That's how every good business does it these days.

1. Identify a product segment
2. Determine total market for that product segment
3. Project company's share of the total market
4. Do market research on what features people want and how much they would pay
5. Determine the unit price people are willing to pay, net out gross margin to get the standard cost which includes factory overhead. Net out the allocated unit factory overhead from the standard cost to get the cost of good for each unit.
6. Give the list of features to the engineers to figure out how to make product without exceeding the cost of goods target.

That's probably true for consumer goods, but I worked primarily in Medical Electronics and there we were given a list of things it had to be and do and told to go at it. Cost was never part of the deal.

That's interesting. 80% of my career has been in medical devices and a good number had to do with new product introductions: implantable heart, inhalable insulin, blood glucose monitoring systems, and blood transplant pathogen treatment. Except for the implantable artificial heart which was forever in phase 3 clinical trials, design and manufacturing were engineered to fit the COGS target. Even then, the artificial heart had cost reduction initiatives as we progressed.

I'm not sure what the difference is between your experience and mine. Just from my experience, the focus on cost was more in the companies that were in the S&P 500. The right hand man of the guy in charge was the controller because they had to deliver on their guidance each quarter.

quote:

Originally posted by sjtill:
I find it interesting that the Korean car manufacturers, Hyundai and Kia (both part of the same combine) are out to eat everyone's lunch.
They have hired the best engineers from Germany (BMW I believe) who are now designing cars that will match or beat the major European marques (to use that snooty word) at a lower cost and with better reliability and lower maintenance costs. The Kia Stinger, Genesis G70, and now with electrics the Hyundai Ioniq 5/Kia KV6 twins. They are actually starting to make cars that are exciting to look at, fun to drive, and won't break the bank.

Back in 2012 I bought a Genesis six cylinder as I started my retirement. It is the best car I ever owned. I wanted a rear wheel drive 4 door sedan with some go power and decent handling. It was substantially less expensive than the competition (Lexus, Infiniti, Bmw) with more power (333 hp) and exceed other specs as well. Heck, my Corvette has just a few more ponies. Only maint issues are standard consumables such as battery, oil and a couple of fuses. Great gas milage.IIRC they had Lotus engineers tweak the suspension after some complaints about first year model handling. This car is a beast! Kudos to Hyundai.

quote:

Originally posted by maxdog:

quote:

Originally posted by sjtill:
I find it interesting that the Korean car manufacturers, Hyundai and Kia (both part of the same combine) are out to eat everyone's lunch.
They have hired the best engineers from Germany (BMW I believe) who are now designing cars that will match or beat the major European marques (to use that snooty word) at a lower cost and with better reliability and lower maintenance costs. The Kia Stinger, Genesis G70, and now with electrics the Hyundai Ioniq 5/Kia KV6 twins. They are actually starting to make cars that are exciting to look at, fun to drive, and won't break the bank.

Back in 2012 I bought a Genesis six cylinder as I started my retirement. It is the best car I ever owned. I wanted a rear wheel drive 4 door sedan with some go power and decent handling. It was substantially less expensive than the competition (Lexus, Infiniti, Bmw) with more power (333 hp) and exceed other specs as well. Heck, my Corvette has just a few more ponies. Only maint issues are standard consumables such as battery, oil and a couple of fuses. Great gas milage.IIRC they had Lotus engineers tweak the suspension after some complaints about first year model handling. This car is a beast! Kudos to Hyundai.

What was distinct about the Korean cars when they started was they offered significantly longer warranty period like a year or two years (I forget). I thought that was necessary and a great marketing ploy to break down any perception of a cheaply made product.