How cheap could a new car be built?

 Imagine you wanted to dominate the worlds market for cheap cars.  Wouldn't matter where you did it,  robots would do the work. 
  Probably should be Electric because low operating cost. 
    Say 100 mile range max and if lead acid gets you that range  at low cost, great.  
    Maybe use cheap plastic ( recycled) body panels.  Cheapest headlites/ taillights available.  Assume annual production of a million plus . Build them in some abandoned warehouse building, wherever.  Robots won't notice the lack of fresh paint. 
  The office would be a trailer hooked up  to the factory.  Until they get robots to fix robots hire locally.  
 No Engineering/ design staff just use off the shelf designs. Simple 2 door fixed windows, the one option a passenger seat. 

I stopped at a snow plow dealer and the parts guy was explaining how much went into the general liability fund when you pay the $20k for the unit.  He said the parts are cheap but liability is high. 

His point was everyone gets hurt on them so a big chunk went to cover the lawsuits.  I'm not sure on that but it sounded good last summer.  

Can you deduct that from your car cost?
 

Tata built the Nano from 2009 to 2018, it cost the equivalent of $1300 when introduced in India and they only broke 70,000 sales per year twice in a country of a couple billion people, total sales over that 10 year period was less than 300,000 while more expensive, better equipped vehicles sold magnitudes more. Your goal of a million per year is ridiculous. The Nissan Micra costs less than $20,000 in Canada, it sells very poorly. People don't want poorly equipped cars in neither the developing world nor developed countries.

Robots can't do everything. They are great at spot welding unibodies and applying sealant along a specified path, but they are horrible at things like installing wiring harnesses, putting a seat in the car and bolting it down. You will need lots of humans to do the finesse work.

Abandoned warehouses have more problems than just peeling paint. Robots don't like rain dripping on them, or rodents chewing their wires or the roof collapsing on them. Plan to spend a lot upgrading your warehouse. Maybe go the same route as Tesla and get a tent?

Will the higher up front cost of an electric drivetrain work out better over the long run than a 660cc engine in a car that gets 50+ miles per gallon? I'm not sure it would.

Even off the shelf components need engineering to get them to work together, not to mention you can't get everything off the shelf. You will need engineering staff. 

It sounds like the Club Car golf carts are the way to go.  Scale up volume where is pricing?

In reply to tremm 
   Young college kids commuting from work to class and a cheap apartment would love these  as would 3rd world countries who have to pay 50% import duty   And have no natural resources  like oil.   A good well made product at a low price  I think the world is waiting for it.  

Mass transit makes more sense in your use case.  It does in a lot of cases.

In reply to Datsun310Guy :

Ah liability.   There are ways around it.  For example oil companies transporting oil mortgage the ship to its full value. If it sinks or leaks or runs aground  they can simply abandon the  asset. Registered in some 3rd world country through 20 shell companies.  Liability is only a problem if it's registered to an oil company. 
  

Don't forget government approval.

Good luck jumping through the bureaucratic hoops there.

pres589 (djronnebaum) said:

Mass transit makes more sense iin your use case.  It does in a lot of cases.

 I'm sorry mass transit really only works near regular lines.  If you want to go from an outer ring suburb to the next suburb over  you take the bus/ lite rail into the city and then back out again possibly  still leaving you with a major walk at each end.  And that's after 2 hours of sitting and waiting.  
   

A big question here is which countries would it be sold in. Safety regs in the US (and likely Europe) preclude a lot of the cheaper cars being sold here. The tata nano never came over for that exact reason. 

Datsun310Guy said:

It sounds like the Club Car golf carts are the way to go.  Scale up volume where is pricing?

Speed?   Ability to deal with rough terrain?     But yes that's the size I'm thinking of.  

frenchyd said:

In reply to tremm 
   Young college kids commuting from work to class and a cheap apartment would love these

That's what 20 year old Honda Civics are for.

Schmidlap said:

The Nissan Micra costs less than $20,000 in Canada, it sells very poorly.

It was actually under $10k Cdn just a few years ago. I don't have any insight into sales numbers. And I think for the sake of Frenchy's discussion, we should stick to "cars that can be sold and operated on any road in any state in the US". No cheating with UTVs and weird registration rules.

EVs can be built quite inexpensively as they're fundamentally simpler, but the battery cost is still a big part of it. The range is a big determining factor in total parts cost.

In reply to Schmidlap :

You really are good at shooting me down.   Let's see if my response is up to your standard.  ;-)     ? 
   Cheap  can be good or bad.  Henry Ford  made the model T a success because it was good compared to the alternative. ( walking or the horse) 

  What is the total global production of new cars?   Marketed to the world at an affordable price point for a reliable means of transportation where the only option is a wrecked and repaired car ?   I suspect it's a market that needs filling.  
  Limitation of robots?   Or limitation of your imagination of what robots can do?     Ever see a box  folded by a machine?   Or how they fill a bottle with something and screw the cap on a zillion times a day?   
    There used to be a U tube  video of robots packing furniture in a shipping container.   That was awesome.  
       There isn't a chore out there that a simple machine can't do 24/7/365.    Usually the limitation is transportation of either the problem or the solution.  Production lines solve that. 
    Ah, you don't need to pick out a leak,  rat infested building. Even if you did, those problems can be fixed. 
  And lower. COST of an ICE versus  Electric and battery. 
  Try this approach.  You have to deliver the ICE with all the fuel it will use over its lifetime. Figure around $28,000   That's assuming gas prices stay at todays rate

   ( electric bill you say?  ). Thanks for asking.  
 The Germans are now printing solar panels on an old newspaper printing press. Yep!   Flexible solar panels!!   So how about in addition to a plug in  we send those units out with a solar panel roof?   Just like the old vinyl roofs?   Maybe not get a full charge waiting for its owner to commute back home. But  definitely  add some charge back in.  
  Here I agree!  Got to make the system work well and that's going to take smart engineers/ designers.   
      Well you could follow Sir William Lyons.   He helped design beautiful cars  and had a few ( very few) trusted engineers   Put stuff together. 
      For most of it he had the suppliers do the engineering.  He'd look at the offerings and selected those he approved of. 

thatsnowinnebago said:

frenchyd said:

In reply to tremm 
   Young college kids commuting from work to class and a cheap apartment would love these

That's what 20 year old Honda Civics are for.

 How many college kids work on their own cars?   Most take it to the dealership what does a Honda dealership charge for. A brake job?  Clutch job?  Automatic transmission?    OK the corner gas station? Oops they don't do repairs anymore.  Well surely  you go do it won't you ?  
    

Cheaper only sells better to a point. It has been proven time and time again. There is no country in which the best selling car is the outright cheapest one.

You're dramatically overestimating the appeal and accessibility of even the most cheaply build cars, due to grossly incorrect assumptions about your target market(s)... Nevermind your wildly overestimated assumptions about manufacturing capabilities, substantially underestimated non-recurring production cost needs, and completely ignored all of the other (overhead, distribution, warranty, etc) costs of doing business.

You can buy a new car in India today for $4,400... It is not the best selling car there though. The best selling car there costs $6,750. The Tata Nano would be ~$3,500 today, and was a massive failure from both a sales and financial perspective.

So to answer your question:

How cheap can one be built and not-profitable? ~$3,500.

How cheap could one be and profitable? ~$4,400.

How cheap could one be and a 'best seller'? ~$6750.

frenchyd said:

 How many college kids work on their own cars?     

It doesn't matter.  The average age of car on the road is already 12.2 years, so there's lot's and lot's of 20 year old cars on the road running fine and dandy.  And even a $3K new car could cover a lot of repairs on an econobox.

frenchyd said:

 How many college kids work on their own cars?   Most take it to the dealership...   

They don't take it to the dealership. Nor do they need to work on it themselves. They typically pu few enough miles a year on it that they can defer or neglect nearly all maintenance during that time. At the extreme low end of the price spectrum, a cheap old Toyonda will be probably more durable and reliable than an equally cheap new car.

This forum needs a user-ignore function.

thatsnowinnebago said:

A big question here is which countries would it be sold in. Safety regs in the US (and likely Europe) preclude a lot of the cheaper cars being sold here. The tata nano never came over for that exact reason. 

You bring up a great issue.  Can  we make it safe and cheap? 
     Well what I understand is weight is a real factor.  As is crush zones.  
   Hmm! plastic  is a wonderful material to crush. I suspect making it crush at a controlled rate shouldn't  be that hard. 
 The goal of 1000 pounds is arbitrary  perhaps less?   The XKE conformed to the crash test. In spite of a 730 pound engine!!!   Is it too outlandish to make a 1/2 size XKE ?  

Driven5 said:

frenchyd said:

 How many college kids work on their own cars?   Most take it to the dealership...   

They don't take it to the dealership. Nor do they need to work on it themselves. They typically pu few enough miles a year on it that they can defer or neglect nearly all maintenance during that time. At the extreme low end of the price spectrum, a cheap old Toyonda will be probably more durable and reliable than an equally cheap new car.

 That's assuming facts not in evidence. 
   Yes Toyota has a great reliability reputation.   But it is on the pricey side of  budget.   Even those will need maintenance.  
   To make the cheap car  sell well reliability would need to be a given. VW came to America and earned a good reputation for affordable transportation in spite of being cheap.  
    The advantage of a simple electric motor is how few moving parts it has.   Would that really  be that difficult? 
    Plus. Assuming 30 mpg and todays gas prices. That's $1400 in annual gas  costs.  I suspect electricity would be cheaper. 

In reply to frenchyd :

That assumes a place to plug it in. 
 

How many college students own a house, or have an apartment with charging available?  How many people living in 3rd world countries have access to reliable electricity?

The biggest hurdles are the cost of safety regulations (like crash testing and DOT regs), the cost of liability, and the cost of warranty issues. It's not a question of inexpensive manufacturing.

Seems like there has almost always been a cheap or super cheap car available.  And not one of those have I seen been anywhere close to a sales leader.  

And then pretending that young people are the ones who you are targeting hasn't worked, either- I remember more than one low end car was targeted toward younger people, and the reality is that they were mostly sold to the exact opposite end of the age spectrum.

When I was in college, you could get a Yugo for next to nothing.  And I never, ever saw one on campus.  5 year old BMW, check, 10 year old Alfa Romeo, check, 8 year old Chevy, check.  Every vintage back 20 years of pick ups, check.  So college age students have never been a good market to appeal to.

Lastly- cheap cars = low profits.  The basic cost to make a Lincoln vs. a Ford is not that far off.  But you can sell a Lincoln for at least $10k more- which is all profit.  Or even better, the cost to make a pick up is more expensive than a car thanks to the frame, but you can almost double the price and people will pay it.  Cheap cars in a developed market is the fast way to bankruptcy.  

You have to make it as a trike, thus it's just a motorcycle with few regulations. Two front driven wheels and single rear for great stability with side by side seating. Like this.