Date: Sun, 17 Jun 2001 15:39:08 +0200 From: Brad Knowles <brad.knowles@skynet.be> To: "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm@toybox.placo.com>, "Rahul Siddharthan" <rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in> Cc: <chat@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: RE: Mundie, Perens, GPL, BSD etc again Message-ID: <p05100318b7525d0f1bde@[194.78.241.123]> In-Reply-To: <000301c0f6fc$9d87fb60$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com> References: <000301c0f6fc$9d87fb60$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com>
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At 12:10 AM -0700 6/17/01, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
> Actually, the biggest redesign between new models using the same
> frame is the shell (I called it slapping on new
> fiberglass but as someone else pointed out most cars have no true frame
> anymore and are unibody construction) but I wouldn't say that the sheetmetal
> is 20% of the design - more like 5-10%. As long as the new body has roughly
> the same
> drag coefficient, wheelbase and weight as the other bodies and you don't do
> anything
> radical (like moving the engine from the front to the back) your fine
> because you then don't have to change the engine power.
I don't recall just how much the "base platform" for the
Golf/Leon/A4/Fabia/New Beetle contains and how much has to be
redesigned for each model, but I do recall that there were more
extensive modifications made for the New Beetle, because the profile
in back is almost exactly the same as it is in the front, and this
caused more things to be moved around than normal.
However, following the 80/20 rule, even if it is only 5-10%, that
5-10% can still be very expensive and time-consuming, and depending
on the flexibility of the manufacturing capacity, can be enough to
prevent two different models from being built on the same line.
> I also think that as far as the Big 3 making vehicles here then shipping
> them
> to Europe, that's a no-go as well because the labor here is way more
> expensive
> than it is in Europe. In fact one of the bigger political issues here is
> the
> amount of manufacturing that the Big 3 send overseas anyway! I suspect that
> if
> the Big 3 had their way, all auto manufacturing in the US would be shut down
> and moved to Mexico.
No, actually the labor is much more expensive over here than it
is in the US. Labor unions are much, much stronger over here than
they are in the US. Indeed, virtually all of France or Germany can
be completely and totally shut down if the Farmers decide to park a
few tractors at key entry points to the highways and at the borders.
Damndest thing is, the police actually friggin' *HELP* them to do
it!!! All it takes is a single farmer to say that he wants to strike
and park his tractor at the entrance to a highway, the police come
along and re-direct all traffic away from that entrance and shift you
down one-lane back roads for dozens or hundreds of miles (or make you
get completely off the highway and take the back roads), and there's
not a bloody thing you can do to make them stop.
I guess it's because the police figure that there would be
trouble if they didn't redirect traffic, and if there is one guy
there could be a hundred, so it's better to go ahead and re-direct
traffic now.
My wife works for Euroclear, the largest clearing and settlement
firm for European stocks and bonds (with over ten trillion dollars of
assets under management, and hundreds of billions of dollars of daily
turnover). Technically, they are incorporated in Belgium as a bank,
so when the members of the Bank Employees Unions strike, that strike
includes Euroclear.
The police chain up and lock all entrance and exit doors, and
people are allowed into and out of the building through a single door
that only allows one person through at a time. If there was ever a
fire, you'd have hundreds or thousands of people dead, because they'd
never be able to remove the chains or the locks fast enough.
Now you just try to tell me that Unions have this kind of power in the US.
No, salaries are lower over here, but the governments take a
larger chunk of the money (I was paying 55% taxes when I was working
at Skynet, and if you're paid a large cash bonus, you can lose 75% or
more due to taxes), and then the Unions take their chunk.
Salaries may be lower, but relatively speaking virtually all
salaries are lower, and the costs that employers pay per employee
(typically about a factor of three per employee in the US) is also
much higher over here, so overall labor costs are actually much, much
higher.
No, they build cars over here not because of labor costs, but
because the additional taxes that would be further levied on them if
they were imported from the US would make them even more
prohibitively expensive. It's bad enough that they suffer 21%
Value-Added Tax (VAT) on top of all duties, and all the other bloody
taxes they have (which can easily make things at least 50% more
expensive over here than they are in the US), but they'd suffer even
worse if they tried to import these from the US.
> No, that's the reason that the Big 3 _want_ to sell more of them, that's
> not why the consumers are are buying them. But all this is a moot point
> now because what is going on now in the US
> is an economic recession that was triggered last year by the Dot-com
> implosion. Coupled with this the gas prices jumped tremendously since
> the beginning of the year, and both of these factors are the two jaws in
> the vise that's closing on SUV's. To add to the fun, there's now a large
> scale dumping of the Ford Explorer on the used market both due to bad
> publicity with the Firestone Tire thing and the rollover problems. So,
> the SUV owners now are really stuck with white elephants that no one wants.
> I think that we have seen the peak on that market pass.
With luck, we'll see SUVs and trucks added to the CAFE
calculations, and we'll see CAFE standards increase (for what, the
first time in twenty-plus years?), and these things will die a rapid
death.
--
Brad Knowles, <brad.knowles@skynet.be>
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