Car Knowledge

I read about the coming demise of Pontiac the other day and it got me to thinking. Not about the loss of the brand, or the loss of all the really cool future Pontiacs that will never be made, but about the disintegration of the Pontiac team: all the people who worked on designing Pontiac cars will be cast to the winds.

The idea of a car is pretty simple. Actual cars are very complicated. Using a car requires only very limited knowledge of how it works. Cars need fuel, you purchase fuel at gas stations. Tires need air. If the air leaks out, the car doesn't go so well anymore. That's about it. Some people spend the time and effort to learn more about how they work, and use that knowledge to take better care of the machinery or even to effect repairs themselves, but that's their choice. It isn't really necessary.

The more you learn about cars, the more you realize how much you don't know. For instance, inside the typical internal combustion engine you have pistons sliding in cylinders, both of which are typically represented as being circular. Cylinders might be, but pistons are actually slightly oval in order to wear better and last longer. If you were rebuilding an engine yourself, you might be checking the dimensions of various parts to the nearest thousandth of inch. Manufacturers typically measure parts to the nearest ten-thousandth of an inch, and they do it with automatic machinery.

And then there are the materials. Cars used to be built of iron and steel, but I doubt there is any simple iron or steel in a modern car anymore. Every part is made from a specific alloy designed for that specific use, from fenders to gears, from seat frames to axles.

There are cars these days that cost a million dollars, should you want to spend that much. What you may not realize is that just about any modern car, if it was built in limited quantities like very expensive cars, would cost just as much, even your lowly Yugo. There is a tremendous infra-structure in place devoted to the mass production of automobiles. Volkswagen recently spent a billion dollars to build a new automobile factory in Germany. If they only built a thousand cars using that factory, the overhead alone would be one million dollars each.

Likewise, there is a tremendous amount of engineering and design work that goes into designing a new car, and even more that goes into designing the equipment and factory used to produce that new car. Putting together a team that can work together well enough to produce a good product can take years. And here we are dumping them on the street. Ah, good ol' American business sense. (Whoops, that was sarcasm. Bad me.)