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Lets Start a Car Company! But Seriously, How Much Would It Cost
BrotherVoodoo
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Registered User regular
Hypothetically, considering how much money is flying out to the car companies just to keep em afloat for a few months, how much would it cost to just start a new one, one that didn't suck, and actually had revelavant affordable vehicles.
BrotherVoodoo on
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Billions upon billions of dollars.
to make a real factory to mass produce the sedan?
Of course, when you're snatching up a failing car company you have to wonder why you're going into the car-making business.
Besides, we should first have an awesome NAME for that car company....like VROOM INC. That should be the first step, no?
Pretty much.
It's called economies of scale. The savings from manufacturing cars en mass make it nonviable to enter the market as a small player, unless your going into some tiny niche market.
I maintain that there will always *be* a parts industry because there will always be wear and tear. Moving parts create friction. Friction creates heat. Heated components have a higher tendency to fail under stress. It's physics.
Efficiency in design will undoubtedly decrease failure rates in parts, but overall, there will still be some failures. The logical progression is not to rely on a third part parts source, either. The logical progression is to make cars as proprietary as possible, relying on a dealer network to repair issues.
You seem to be confusing parts supply with parts maintenance. There will always be the latter, yes. But all places outsource the vast majority of their manufactured parts from suppliers. There's simply too much for a single company to do, so the mindset of making everything proprietary is out. And yes, parts suppliers do go under, and ARE going under right now. It's a very precarious situation. You need all your gears to make a car. Even missing one little bearing means you can't go forward even if you have all the other pieces.
Let 'em eat fucking pineapples!
The Lumberjack, the Hockey Player (complete with missing-tooth-design grille) and of course, the Beaver.
if Chrysler and the CAW don't make nice maybe I can buy up their manufacturing lines and get cracking.
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Almost all the "new" car companies in developing nations are owned at least in part by one or more existing car companies....it was basically just their way of expanding into new markets.
It takes a huge amount of capital to legitimately go into the car market with the intention of selling everyday cars to everyday people.
Honestly unless you're doing a boutique market like tesla there's zero chance you'd even convince someone to give you venture funds.
and yeah, niche is where the money is. The mainstream market is flooded.
buying any company short of toyota and honda to retool them seems like a waste. even though we're talking about maintenance as a fact of life, there's a difference in reliability and purposely not improving mechanical failures to promote the repair market. it's not a mistake that it takes special tools and you have to remove the whole dang ford engine to repair something relativly minor in a ford f series. thats been built into the design.
even going into the toyota hybrids, you only need to replace bad cells not the whole battery. starting over just keeps looking better and better instead of trying to fix these guys.
Since "small, responsive RWD coupe" seems to be a "niche" market now judging by mainstream offerings, how about someone gets on that? :P
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Tesla is ten to twenty years from even thinking about entering the mainstream market. The sedan is at a 55,000 price point, they'll be doing really good to build and sell 500 a month initially.
See how many books I've read so far in 2010
Tucker says: "Run away! Run away!"
Car companies don't necessarily need to be national or global. You're not going to make crazy profits though. Which is kind like the way things are now har har har.
Would he make any profits at all? Cars involve a ton of technology. The cost of implementing said technology, and creating cars for that small of a market would be futile.
I'm not talking state-of-the-art materials, tech, or gadgets. I'm mean your basic people movers.
Like Tata of India.
And then when everyone in town is driving your car, you can blow all your money, be declared Too Big To Fail, and get some sweet sweet bailout cheddar. :P
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I'm pretty sure that Tata's cars are so cheap in large part because they sell millions of them.
That won't work in Canada or the USA. The economic downturn might make it look like selling cheap junk cars would be viable but you'd be competing with a huge used cars market and existing automakers desperately trying to sell off surplus inventory at below cost so they don't go under. Not to mention that by the time you get your production line up and running the recession will be over and everyone will be buying car's that aren't crap.
Also, the cheaper your product the smaller your mark up (profit per unit) tends to be, so selling a small number of something at a low price almost guarantee's a profit so small it won't be worth the initial investment.
You wouldn't be using your own engines/gearboxes until you really got your company off the ground, it's just so much cheaper to source those from Ford or GM than it is to blow your R&D budget. Doing this will let you develop your own powertrain at a more reasonable pace.
Hell, the Shelby Series 1 used a fucking Oldsmobile Aurora engine.
... For some reason I have this halfbaked harebrained idea that a RWD coupe based on a supercharged GM 3800 would be smart. They're a dime a dozen, durable as hell, and make some pretty solid power.
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I think I've seen Cobra replica kits that can accept GM V6's, so there's your 3800 series engine RWD lightweight car.
Of course the kits also accept GM 350s, so if you get the 3800 you will always feel like you should have sprung for the 350.
That crazy british guy, Mark Evans, puts a cobra kit together originally planning on using a four-banger, but decides to up the engine when he gets to the point of installing it. I think his options were rover V8, GM V6, or GM 350, and he went with a carbed 350.
Don't the later versions of the 3800 put out as much or more power than a 350, though?
You have to consider the fact that they vastly overstated the numbers any pre-1975 engine. IIRC they didn't really get more than 250hp in modern terms.
Edit: Unless you mean a modern LT1 or LS1, which come to think of it is probably what you mean.
I'm betting he means the original small-block 350 (L98) - good for 225hp/330lb-ft. An L32 (3800 Series III) made 260hp/~280lb-ft, L67s (Series II) were short 20hp due to the older 3rd-generation blower.
And yeah, throw one of those in a Cobra replicar and everyone goes "What, couldn't afford the V8?"
No, I want something that's designed for the smaller engine with a nice open intake so that everyone in a five-block radius hears the blower whine.
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Look at the ProDrive P2. Take an established platform, have the engineer go to town, then reverse engineer what you'd need and strike up parts deals with component manufacturers. The real nitty gritty, as far as that R&D goes, is determining mean shelf life of parts - i.e. how long can those parts last in multiple driving situations - low mileage, high frequency trips vs. high mileage, constant trips, etc.
So if that is the case, one could buy a factory from Ford or GM, hire the correct number of workers to man it, and churn out a decent profit. You'd have to have some decent car designs, of course, and a distribution system. But you wouldn't want to start now anyway, because no sane seller would add a whole new line of cars to his lot when they're desperately trying to sell off the ones they've got.
I would so buy 10 of those cars.