Disclaimer up front: I work for GM. These are my opinions only and do not reflect my employer etc.. I don't work in corporate planning, but I have some familiar

Disclaimer up front: I work for GM. These are my opinions only and do not reflect my employer etc.. I don't work in corporate planning, but I have some familiarity with vehicle platforms and programs. I see a lot of people commenting on specific OEMs and getting caught up on details. That's not what this is about. This is about the fact that GM has a ~1.5 liter turbo 4 cylinder and so does Ford and so does FCA and so does Volkswagen and so does ... ... ... The specific 4 banger in a vehicle will never be a differentiator for a customer (except in VERY specific cases), so anything you spend on R+D for that engine will not help you get ahead, only to keep up. It's about the fact that developing a engine that no one will ever get excited about still costs a great deal of money, and pretty much every OEM is spending that money. That cost is dragging the whole industry down, and that's why EBIT and Return on Invested Capital is low across the industry (but it may be lower for some OEMs). It's about the fact that ~50% of components may be like that engine that the customer will never get excited about. --- It also talks about how companies are trying to mitigate that by platform sharing, with pictures of a couple from Volkswagen and Toyota. Shared platforms are great for a lot of products, but they don't work so well for specialized products like sports cars or luxury cars. Here's a great video covering GM's plans for their electric car platform (shameless plug): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-25fGfjHP5Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-25fGfjHP5Y --- It also talks about how hard this is to do. I know of several instances where this has been done or been tried and it's always been harder and lower payoff than expected. For example, Ford and GM cooperated on the development of a 9 speed (Ford) and a 10 speed (GM). Each company developed their own transmission and then at the end they shared them.