Needlessly Complicated; Why?

Lately we've had a lot of talk about German cars being needlessly complicated. Naturally the Germans aren't unique in this but they seem to be the poster kids. This really hit home when reading about a $3,000 OEM Battery in a Cayenne.

Since we have a lot of engineers here I am curious to how these things happen.

As many of you know I work in procurement. I've had my share of arguments with engineering and vice versa.  The best firms I worked at had engineering give us a spec and then we found the product that met set spec and the worst firms I've worked at had the engineers working directly with sales engineers. The former process kept everyone happy whereas the latter led to confrontations.

So I will pick on German cars a bit here; is it a cultural thing? Is it a case were these manufacturers are set up in a way that one doesn't question the engineering department and or they simply don't do "good enough"?  

I am truly interested to know how these things happen as I am dumbfounded as to why.

Ask a German why they make cars so complicated?

"Because we can"

Everybody else is catching up.

Following.  I'm an engineer (aerospace), and I work alongside business development, but have experience working with procurement, etc.  Its interesting how in the automotive world, often "engineering" is blamed for problems.  There are lots of players involved and none of them make decisions in a vacuum (in most companies anyway).

Curious to hear thoughts on these complex designs.

The optimist in me has always thought it has to do with easy/modigular assembly in the factory and not caring that you have to remove the entire car to change a heater core (looking at you Mercedes).  Or that a simple alternator change can be an engine out.

The pessimist in me says that it is designed to help them sell more new cars.  Someone who comes in for service and is faced with 10-15K bill, and then a sales rep comes by and they are saying that we can slide you into this new car and we will give you a good trade in on you car that needs all this work.   Why spend 15k when we can get you into a brand new car.  People actually will just say F it and buy the new car. 

  

With Porsche, I'm guessing it's the need to be considered cutting edge. Costs be damned. Some Cayenne owner has been proud that their car has a lithium battery and told their buddy about it. 

I kind of wonder if it's the search for more and better efficiency.  Kind of following the 80/20 rule.  Getting 80% to a goal can be easy, but that ladt 20% is a bear.  Especially when you are getting to the point where you are searching for 10ths of a percent improvement.

Its the same reason, in reverse, that for most engineers gravity = 10 m/s*s and pi=3.  You start to model reality and reality gets messy and convoluted 

In reply to Toyman! :

This. While German cars have a tendency to overcomplication, it's not fair to paint them all with the Porsche brush. They love to throw technology at things, much like McLaren, and engineer every problem into submission with no expense spared. The battery in the new hybrid 911 has a really impressive energy density, about the size and weight of a large lead-acid car battery like you might find in a pickup, but it's enough to run a mild hybrid powertrain with TERS that relies entirely on TERS harvesting for boost control!

In reply to GameboyRMH :

And from there, that complication trickles down to VW and Audi. BMW steals engineers from VAG and that complication spreads and becomes the national standard. 

So I get the we are cutting edge part but your still a for profit company. In the case of a $3,000 battery, let's say the mark up is 100% so the battery actually costs $1500. If you source a $1,000 battery for a Cayenne, the cost savings given the number of units sold is going to be around $10,000,000 annually.

The business side of these decisions is the main thing that stumps me. 

In reply to Tom1200 :

Porsche doesn't care because their customers don't care. Porsche buyers aren't value shopping. They are Porsche shopping.

A $3k cost in a $100k car is nothing. 3% isn't going to make the average buyer blink.

Add to that, as a manufacturer, they don't pay $3k, they probably pay less than $1k. 

Edit to say, manufacturers aren't concerned about repair costs. Junk yards are full of BMWs and Mercedes that need $$$$ electronic components because they aren't worth repairing. 

$3,000 for a battery? That's cute. May I present to you: BMW's high pressure fuel pump. $15,022.37. What's BMW's slogan? Oh yeah. "We looked perfection in the eye, and perfection couldn't afford the fuel pump for its 7 series".

https://www.ecstuning.com/b-genuine-bmw-parts/high-pressure-fuel-pump-priced-each/13517529068/?gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=19434527030&gbraid=0AAAAAD-pFG5xcjX1xjenA6LGxOH4uUY-I&gclid=CjwKCAjwruXBBhArEiwACBRtHWArzAq8zypHi3_Q4wyqBXQbHneCgQakcXx4N9w6t_-z-JDhrGtJjxoCSicQAvD_BwE

In reply to confuZion3 :

Daaaaaaaaaaaaamn!

Tom1200 said:

So I get the we are cutting edge part but your still a for profit company. In the case of a $3,000 battery, let's say the mark up is 100% so the battery actually costs $1500. If you source a $1,000 battery for a Cayenne, the cost savings given the number of units sold is going to be around $10,000,000 annually.

The business side of these decisions is the main thing that stumps me. 

You say this like they don't bake that expense into the price of the car. Just like taxes and tariffs, it's the consumer that ends up paying those costs. 

confuZion3 said:

$3,000 for a battery? That's cute. May I present to you: BMW's high pressure fuel pump. $15,022.37. What's BMW's slogan? Oh yeah. "We looked perfection in the eye, and perfection couldn't afford the fuel pump for its 7 series".

https://www.ecstuning.com/b-genuine-bmw-parts/high-pressure-fuel-pump-priced-each/13517529068/?gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=19434527030&gbraid=0AAAAAD-pFG5xcjX1xjenA6LGxOH4uUY-I&gclid=CjwKCAjwruXBBhArEiwACBRtHWArzAq8zypHi3_Q4wyqBXQbHneCgQakcXx4N9w6t_-z-JDhrGtJjxoCSicQAvD_BwE

Jeez. you probably could have one custom machined for less.

z31maniac said:

Tom1200 said:

So I get the we are cutting edge part but your still a for profit company. In the case of a $3,000 battery, let's say the mark up is 100% so the battery actually costs $1500. If you source a $1,000 battery for a Cayenne, the cost savings given the number of units sold is going to be around $10,000,000 annually.

The business side of these decisions is the main thing that stumps me. 

You say this like they don't bake that expense into the price of the car. Just like taxes and tariffs, it's the consumer that ends up paying those costs. 

Who said anything about passing  the cost savings on to the buyer?

One of the functions of Purchasing is to increase an organization's margin.

theruleslawyer said:

confuZion3 said:

$3,000 for a battery? That's cute. May I present to you: BMW's high pressure fuel pump. $15,022.37. What's BMW's slogan? Oh yeah. "We looked perfection in the eye, and perfection couldn't afford the fuel pump for its 7 series".

https://www.ecstuning.com/b-genuine-bmw-parts/high-pressure-fuel-pump-priced-each/13517529068/?gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=19434527030&gbraid=0AAAAAD-pFG5xcjX1xjenA6LGxOH4uUY-I&gclid=CjwKCAjwruXBBhArEiwACBRtHWArzAq8zypHi3_Q4wyqBXQbHneCgQakcXx4N9w6t_-z-JDhrGtJjxoCSicQAvD_BwE

Jeez. you probably could have one custom machined for less.

Relax. It's on sale. 

Engineers work to meet the requirements they are given, and that work is just one thing informing the business decisions. In my experience, most 'bad engineering' is actually the result of bad requirements and/or business decisions... Neither of which the Engineers actually control.

A lot of what I see with things like this is that whoever was working on that component had a set of validation tasks in front of them, and they followed them to a T, and the result was a fairly complicated, expensive component that, at least when new, performed well. In many cases, the best designs I see come from individuals or groups who understand what is actually important about the requirements and validation process and so are able to waive or alter requirements where they don't make sense. So some of it really depends on who worked on it, and down the road there are often cost reduction projects that capture things like this and cost reduce them out.

The difference between "good enough" and "perfect" when judged against a requirement list makes a huge difference in price tag, and a lot of us GRMers appreciate the simplicity of "good enough" over the complexity of "perfect". Plenty of people buy those products in part because they are complex, and they like the technological wonderment of it all.

There is usually some level of oversight, but before I worked for engineering companies, I always thought there were more checks on questionable designs than there actually are. A lot of odd, overcomplicated stuff makes it to production just because people weren't paying attention. Or because it was someone's golden goose that couldn't be touched. I've got plenty of examples of that, from engineering leaders in "protected" positions of power, driving decisions that people doing the work thought were ridiculous, but there wasn't a way to do anything about it without getting fired.

That HPFP is wild. I've seen some stuff like that where supply-based pricing is automated and gets out of control (as available qty goes down, price spikes exponentially) but who knows. Sometimes it's just the stackup of margins and fees through the supply chain. 

I am of two minds about this.

On one hand, remember in the 70's and early 80's when the Germans were pioneering things like fuel injection, IRS and overdrive transmissions and everyone thought that was unnecessary nonsense when carburetors, leaf springs and 1960's transmissions worked just fine? These were some of the reasons I was drawn to cheap used BMW and VW products when I got into cars in the 90's

I will even forgive some of the really complicated, and troublesome timing chain systems they used.

On the other hand, I don't want to have to "code" a simple 12V lead acid battery. 

The problem with building vehicles the way Ford and GM do, is that you end up with vehicles like Ford and GM make. 

WWII German tanks had transmissions with about a billion parts, and the turret and front of the tank had to come off to repair them. The complexity meant lengthy training, and the ability to grenade the transmission with a missed shift.  The Sherman transmission was easy to shift, robust, and could be pulled out through an access panel. 

gearheadE30 said:

because it was someone's golden goose that couldn't be touched. I've got plenty of examples of that, from engineering leaders in "protected" positions of power, driving decisions that people doing the work thought were ridiculous, but there wasn't a way to do anything about it without getting fired.

I've experienced this as well.  

I did work at a Japanese company for several years and the culture was very much of the Emeperor's New Clothes variety. 

Driven5 said:

In my experience, most 'bad engineering' is actually the result of bad requirements and/or business decisions... Neither of which the Engineers actually control.

In the industry I was in the engineers actually controlled a lot. This cut both ways; you had a lot of people who did amazing work but you also had a lot of them with run away egos and were financially irresponsible. 

In reply to pinchvalve (Forum Supporter) :

As noted, this philosophy definitely goes back to at least WWII.  Germany was renown for making very impressive weapons systems... on paper.  Even the V2 (unguided missiles they dropped on London many times), though absolutely world breaking in it's technology, the amount of effort that was put into it for the results (completely indefensible 2000lb bomb dropping out of the sky, but with only city size accuracy) is a bit hard to justify (now... if they were able to get a nuke...).  Tanks are the best example.  The Panther and Tiger have some impressive capabilities (guns, armor etc), but both were complex (expensive to build / maintain) and generally unreliable, thus far less practically useful.  In one case, the mean time between failure for the transmission in combat use was similar to the range of the tank on a tank of gas!!! 

If, for example, Germany had simply put all that effort into modernizing the Panzer IV, they would have ended up with many, many more tanks, without a huge downgrade in overall capability and crew training would have been much faster / easier.  Much of this direction was the result of Hilter's meddling BTW (micro manager).  He was a huge fan of the theoretical "wonder weapon".

The allies, certainly went the other way.  I think the US (e.g. Sherman) more by necessity (they didn't have any other designs, immediately available), while the Russians clearly went with the numbers over precision route.  They could pump out massive numbers of what is effectively the clunky T34 for the effort of building a Tiger, and you surround a Tiger with 5 T-34's, bad things will happen!  This philosophy still survives a bit in Russia BTW, which I think has a bit more to do with creating things that appear to do what they are supposed to rather than actually doing it in practice (something that seemed to be common in Soviet Russia... essentially corruption).

Plane wise, Germany did a lot better.  Some of their engineering innovations were just clearly a better designs.  Their development of an altitude compensating supercharger is an example.  Just set the boost level, and it adjusts based on altitude (over boosting in lower thick air is a big concern).   Allied designs, even late in the war, required the pilot to manually select different blower levels, based on altitude (which I am sure was a bit of an issue in combat!).  

Am I saying German engineering is still being influenced by Hitler, whether they admit it or not!?!

Trent said:

I am of two minds about this.

 

On one hand, remember in the 70's and early 80's when the Germans were pioneering things like fuel injection, IRS and overdrive transmissions and everyone thought that was unnecessary nonsense when carburetors, leaf springs and 1960's transmissions worked just fine? These were some of the reasons I was drawn to cheap used BMW and VW products when I got into cars in the 90's

I will even forgive some of the really complicated, and troublesome timing chain systems they used.

On the other hand, I don't want to have to "code" a simple 12V lead acid battery. 

 

The problem with building vehicles the way Ford and GM do, is that you end up with vehicles like Ford and GM make. 

You mean vehicles the work past 125k. I just replaced a 125k mile VW with a 300k mile GM because the GM isn't going to leave me in traffic while it throws a temper tantrum. 

Driven5 said:

Engineers work to meet the requirements they are given, and that work is just one thing informing the business decisions. In my experience, most 'bad engineering' is actually the result of bad requirements and/or business decisions... Neither of which the Engineers actually control.

Sometimes. Business folks aren't engineers they don't understand the implications of everything they ask. A good engineer will push back to understand the intent of the requirements. Some of the junior engineers I deal with will execute very literally on requirements and ignore the whole discussion around them and fail to bring up issues they discover in development. Luckily the seniors usually work to make sure the intent is followed rather than the letter and surface issues discovered in development. Otherwise you end up with a 100page requirements doc and spend a month of productive time on just the documentation. Ideally its a collaborative process where you can balance technical and business needs.  Occasionally you have to push through bad decisions for business reasons. That's when its just out of their hands. Make the best solution you can and move on.