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A Company That Tears Cars Apart to Find Out How They're Built
- tomcam 9y agoOr they could just rent a car and disassemble it without the owner’s knowledge, as Mercedes is alleged to have done … https://jalopnik.com/mercedes-parent-company-daimler-dismantled-a-rented-tes-1820961392 https://jalopnik.com/mercedes-parent-company-daimler-dismant...
- michaelt 9y agoI guess I don't understand the surprise about this? In the 1970s my father worked at a company that supplied parts to car manufacturers, and it was a normal thing - if Company X say they want a backlit switch with the clicky feel of a Company Y Model Z, they hired a Company Y Model Z, took the switch off and measured it. According to my father, the car industry and the car rental industry all know this is commonplace.
- vinceguidry 9y agoThis is the sort of thing that makes my eyes roll and my attention wander whenever politicos hammer on about the loss of our manufacturing base being America's imminent downfall. The amount of institutional knowledge baked into our industries is simply mind-boggling. The only reason we can get away with outsourcing manufacturing in the first place is because this knowledge is so amazingly thorough.
- ggg9990 9y agoWe have transferred a TON of this institutional knowledge to China. Now companies like DJI can compete and beat us, and it’s all with knowledge that we transferred to them in the last 30 years.
- ethbro 9y agoA lot of that transfer was explicitly driven by government policy. If you're ever around the Beijing airport, you'll notice a mushroom patch of well-known non-Chinese companies' facilities. The one constant? More security around the buildings than a military base. I'm not one to beat the US / European nationalistic gong, but it's a fact that the Chinese government has specifically targeted foreign industries to force into tech transfer. And foreign governments generally haven't done anything meaningful about it.
- traek 9y agoHow has China forced companies into tech transfer? Nobody forces them to manufacture in China.
- Spooky23 9y agoBut the PRC can prevent them from selling in China. Shareholders care about the quarterly results. Nobody cares about the company a few years on. The Chinese have a long view on this stuff. If you put out an engineering RFP, you can be sure that Chinese companies and government are probably the biggest web consumers of your content.
- ethbro 9y agoManufacturing is a large industry, but it's what China was targeting in the 1950s. They're aiming higher now. Most of the tech transfer is around next gen industries, such as batteries. And as for who is forcing foreign companies to do this? Hilariously enough, capitalism. Multinationals can't afford to miss selling to the Chinese market, or their board / shareholder's vote them out. So they're left to strike the best deal they can get, given that the outcome is already known by both parties. (Exceptions like Google exist, but it does have an atypical stock structure) From the Minneapolis Fed (2016), https://www.minneapolisfed.org/research/economic-policy-papers/chinas-foreign-investment https://www.minneapolisfed.org/research/economic-policy-pape... (the first authoritative source I could find): "China’s quid pro quo policy also helps account for the unusual global investment flow. Chinese policy requires multinational firms that want access to China’s huge market to transfer partial property rights to their technology, often through R&D centers or joint ventures with Chinese firms (Holmes, McGrattan and Prescott 2015a, 2015b)."
- com2kid 9y ago> Now companies like DJI can compete and beat us DJI hires high quality Chinese engineers. Their software is better than what American consumer drone companies manage to push out, and they can push the latest tech to market insanely quick, as GoPro learned the hard way when they found out DJI was a half generation ahead of them on drone tech. DJI has great customer service, an amazing insurance plan that provides piece of mind, and bullet proof build quality. They do have a major advantage of being in China, so they can work with suppliers much more directly. It doesn't feel like they are using the grey technology market though. A lot of the lower priced drones are obviously put together from Shenzen part bins, but DJI just feels good all around. That said, their Android mobile app is a bit janky at times. Then again, lots of stuff on Android is a bit janky...
- plantain 9y agoThis is patently untrue - DJI has some of the worst customer service I have ever experienced, especially for a 1000$ device. I spent two months calling every other day trying to resolve a hardware issue and ended up issuing a chargeback before getting any attention. Go read the DJI hardware/software support forums. Never. Again.
- com2kid 9y agoFair enough, I've seen mixed reports. I have the care program, and everything I've ever seen about that has consisted of people saying they got their drone replaced quickly and without fuss.
- xemoka 9y agoThey're great for a toy or a hobbyist, but companies or anyone who relies on the drone tech should look elsewhere. I can relate to awful customer support and even strange software problems that are refused to exist by DJI.
- vuln 9y agoDo you remember when the DoD banned use of any DJI drone due to it phoning home everything to China?
- gumby 9y agoNothing stops you from doing a tear down on a DJI drone and reverse engineering it.
- devy 9y agoMunro & Associates wants to sell these automobile tear-down reports to China so much that they even translated their marketing materials into Chinese :) http://leandesign.com/bmwi3-videos-chinese/ http://leandesign.com/bmwi3-videos-chinese/
- solaarphunk 9y agoBMW and Audi literally manufacture their cars in China now. I feel like at this point we are practically giving our IP away.
- erokar 9y agoI read cats.
- dajohnson89 9y agoHaynes makes manuals for every car just about (in the US at least), and I'm pretty sure they do a complete tear-down and rebuild for each one. https://haynes.com/en-us/ https://haynes.com/en-us/
- Arbalest 9y agoThat's a teardown that a mechanic can use, this is about a teardown an engineer (or engineering team) can use.
- Luc 9y agoA fun comparison: Munro on the BMW i3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqiBWfsDTAA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqiBWfsDTAA Munro on the Tesla Model 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCIo8e12sBM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCIo8e12sBM
- devy 9y agoOh man! Munro is brutally honest in his assessment of manufacturing excellence :) The contrast makes me chuckle.
- sxates 9y agoOne of those companies is a multi-million dollar client for them, and one is not.
- devy 9y agoI suspected that as well - but any hints of evidence? To be fair though, Tesla's manufacturing quality does indeed falling behind their targeted segment majorly. Like Munro said, even Kia makes better assembly these days (without uneven gaps etc.) But yes, have a paid contract for product promotion doesn't hurt
- THE_PUN_STOPS 9y agoOn the other hand, Munro is a company whose ability to sell products and services depends wholly on the veracity of their reports.
- Someone1234 9y agoInstead of attacking their reputation, maybe pointing out actual flaws with the assessment as presented would be more constructive?
- rsp1984 9y agoBMW certainly doesn't pay them to rip apart an i3. Their competitors do.
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- Hasz 9y agoI'm amazed they sell all that info for just $150,000. I figure there's around ~125 major automakers in the world, maybe a dozen or two or so big enough to own their own labs. For each 23,000 page document, we're only taking ~15M, max. For a team of manufacturing experts, this just isn't that much cash. I suspect a majority of their cash flow comes from those training seminars, and the $150K book is just to get you in the door and interested. I would love to see a breakdown of their revenue.
- mywittyname 9y agoThey don't just sell to major auto makers. Governments are a huge customer. OEM suppliers are another big one, they don't buy the comprehensive reports, just component reports. I heard the owner/chief engineer give a talk a while ago, specifically about the i3, and he said the report was originally priced at $500k for the full thing. So it's possible that the price of these reports drop with age. Edit: they also do perform costing on a contract basis. So an OEM will actually pay them to tear down a competitor vehicle, and Munro reserves the rights to sell that report too.
- csours 9y ago23 automakers (OEMs) sold more than 1 million vehicles in 2016; 42 sold more than 100,000. http://www.oica.net/wp-content/uploads/World-Ranking-of-Manufacturers.pdf http://www.oica.net/wp-content/uploads/World-Ranking-of-Manu... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_manufacturers_by_motor_vehicle_production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_manufacturers_by_motor...
- pcnix 9y agoIt does seem like they would have a lot of supplementary income from training and workshops.
- igitur 9y agoSo you're saying that, unlike me, if they try to put it all back together, no parts will be left lying around at the end?
- ramy_d 9y agowhat about software? I'm reminded of what farmers have to go through with John Deere tractors [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8JCh0owT4w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8JCh0owT4w]. Isn't that going to start happening with cars (I thought this was already happening). Are they going to reverse engineer that too?
- PoachedSausage 9y agoProbably easier to just pay someone that specialises in breaking into corporate networks to get the source code to give to your own devs.
- salgernon 9y agoI wonder if they acknowledge any responsibility if their tear-downs reveal recallable design defects? Not that I'd want them to be persecuted, but they'd be in a great position to notice that something may be under-spec'd for a given workload. The article also didn't mention any reverse engineering of the software - I'm sure someone could clone the physical parts of an i3 and have a vastly substandard product because without a thorough understanding of the software...
- mschuster91 9y ago> I wonder if they acknowledge any responsibility if their tear-downs reveal recallable design defects? Why should anyone be held responsible to find a flaw in a 3rd party product and not report it? It might be considered unethical if a life-threatening issue, yes, but IMHO there is no way to attach legal responsibility.
- kazinator 9y agoBut you're a criminal if you disassemble an executable.
- mc32 9y agoI was under the impression all car MFGs did their own tear-downs as well to ensure or at least gauge how easy/difficult it is to recycle a car. The car "green" effort back in the mid 90s.
- sharpercoder 9y agoShould not the government require manufacturers to extensively document all the parts and materials that go into a product? In this age, we should demand that products are easily (re/up/down)cycle-able, and this means third parties should be able to efficiently dismantle products.
- jerkstate 9y agoIf the regulatory burden for starting a new car company was that high, you would have never seen Tesla, which means you would never see any pressure on the big guys to go all electric. So you need to balance regulation with innovation.
- sharpercoder 9y agoAgreed. But for a product like a car, it would be fair to comply much later after-the-fact; it's not like the car is driven straight into the junkyard ;). For products like food (packaging) it seems different though.
- xcvbxzas 9y agoThat does not seem like much of a burden, at all. All of that information is required knowledge for the business to operate and production to continue. You can't make something if you don't even know what materials you need to make it, nor if you don't know how to put it together. In the case of extremely low production with hand-fitting the documented process may vary some from the actual process but it shouldn't be so significant that one product does not even resemble another.
- mschuster91 9y agoWhat is the regulatory burden in forcing car manufacturers to publish the same manuals and offer the same tools for purchase they already have for their own service centers? Besides many countries do require automobile mass market vendors to offer spare parts and docs on FRAND conditions to "unconnected" repair shops already.
- bwang29 9y agoI developed new appreciation for car manufacturing from this article. The way that one component depends on other common components reminded me of NPM packages. I'm wondering what if they found one car infringing another car's design or engineering IP without fulfilling a license, or if they would find certain car makers "reinvent the wheel" simultaneously. A lot of car makers need to properly license certain design from other car makers. I wonder if this also helps facilitating and defending these licensable designs, or encouraging open sourcing design in cars. I suspect the overall outcome of finding similar design and borrow existing design from one car maker into another is a good thing for bringing the cost down.
- mschuster91 9y agoMost car components actually do not come from the car manufacturer. For example: Bosch (which is famous for its drilling machines) is also a common manufacturer of engine control units and other parts and got flak for it during the diesel scandal, Knorr Bremse is an industry supplier for brakes on trucks and buses and Takata a supplier of airbags. Takata actually is the perfect example: no matter what car manufacturer there is, they all ended up on the infamous airbag recall list: https://www.nhtsa.gov/recall-spotlight/takata-air-bags https://www.nhtsa.gov/recall-spotlight/takata-air-bags
- Arbalest 9y agoIt's kinda frustrating that reverse engineering in the physical space is not protected (as evidenced here), but stuff like the DMCA tends to do a lot more for protecting software. Seems ridiculous to me. Perhaps this is why these guys aren't also reverse engineering the control systems (as suggested by many comments, I'm not sure it is true)
- mutagen 9y agoWith more and more functionality moving into software, is Munro or anyone else doing anything along these lines with the firmware and software in vehicles? Are manufacturers as interested in evaluating the process and design of their software as they are with the physical pieces of the vehicle? Do copyright and sometimes murky legalities around reverse engineering software prevent the equivalent teardown (disassembly) and analysis of software components? Despite being known for kaizen processes implemented as Plan -> Do -> Check -> Act or 5 Whys, Toyota's issues with unintended acceleration were partly blamed on flaws and spaghetti code in the RTOS controlling their Electronic Throttle Control System in some models: https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~koopman/pubs/koopman14_toyota_ua_slides.pdf https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~koopman/pubs/koopman14_toyota_ua_... http://www.safetyresearch.net/blog/articles/toyota-unintended-acceleration-and-big-bowl-%E2%80%9Cspaghetti%E2%80%9D-code http://www.safetyresearch.net/blog/articles/toyota-unintende... That's just one example. There's the CAN bus car hacking via OnStar and more examples out there. Would this kind of analysis help more than say, simply implementing better software development methodologies?
- m0th87 9y agoHere’s a talk of someone who’s reverse engineered CAN buses and made a python library to help: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bZNhMcv4Y8&app=desktop https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bZNhMcv4Y8&app=desktop
- larrydag 9y agoIronic that is perfectly okay by manufacturers for someone to disassemble their car yet electronics companies go nuts and sue you. https://spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/conservation/why-we-must-fight-for-the-right-to-repair-our-electronics https://spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/conservation/why-we-mus...
- revelation 9y agoTalk about the software companies..
- nraynaud 9y agoCar companies use third parties to decap and analyse chips before negotiating the buying price. Source: I was the one buying the IT app to manage the results of the analysis.
- kuschku 9y agoThis is why the EU made disassembling software a right for certain use cases, because it's standard practice in all other industries, it is unreasonable to ban it in software.
- everyone 9y agoEveryone would save time if the car companies just sold the schematics of their cars to each other.
- userbinator 9y agoIt's very interesting to look at the number and complexity of parts in even an extremely old and thus much simpler car, then contrast it to cars today with at least 2 orders of magnitude more; this one for 1929-32 Chevrolets, for example, is already over 300 pages: http://chevy.oldcarmanualproject.com/parts/1929_32/index.html http://chevy.oldcarmanualproject.com/parts/1929_32/index.htm... ...and from it we can also glean somewhat surprising historical facts, such as the fact that pistons were $1.75 each: http://chevy.oldcarmanualproject.com/parts/1929_32/2932mppl002.html http://chevy.oldcarmanualproject.com/parts/1929_32/2932mppl0...
- known 9y agoLeast expensive cars to maintain https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11879869 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11879869 https://www.yourmechanic.com/article/the-most-and-least-expensive-cars-to-maintain-by-maddy-martin https://www.yourmechanic.com/article/the-most-and-least-expe...
- baud147258 9y agoI'm pretty sure I've already read this, from HN. Oh well it's good enough that I don't mind re reading it.
- gadders 9y agoI'd have loved to have seen some footage of them actually dismantling stuff, to see how they do it without damaging items, special techniques they use etc.
- 72deluxe 9y agoI did work experience for Rover many years ago and they had a department that took competitor's cars apart to see how they were built and how much they could build the cars for. Some cars were selling for much more than their assembly and parts cost. I think a lot of manufacturers did this.