A friend of mine’s first assignment as a senior engineer was to find ways to eliminate more moving parts and metal fasteners from cheaper spec products, because removing a dozen two cent screws would save the company tens of millions over the life of the design. Not just in parts, but because they’re more complicated and take longer to install than just snapping and glueing a plastic shell together.
With the scale of manufacturing at companies like GM and Ford, saving a few thousand per car on parts and labor with a touchscreen infotainment system is a massive, massive amount of money. The R&D costs of converting from knobs to touchscreens would probably be covered in the first few months.
Precisely. And keep in mind that the buttons and knobs would usually be different on the different models, but with the touchscreen OS you have one OS you keep developing and just hide some of the features in some of the models. So there’s less model-specific R&D and more common R&D for all products
A friend of mine’s first assignment as a senior engineer was to find ways to eliminate more moving parts and metal fasteners from cheaper spec products, because removing a dozen two cent screws would save the company tens of millions over the life of the design. Not just in parts, but because they’re more complicated and take longer to install than just snapping and glueing a plastic shell together.
With the scale of manufacturing at companies like GM and Ford, saving a few thousand per car on parts and labor with a touchscreen infotainment system is a massive, massive amount of money. The R&D costs of converting from knobs to touchscreens would probably be covered in the first few months.
Precisely. And keep in mind that the buttons and knobs would usually be different on the different models, but with the touchscreen OS you have one OS you keep developing and just hide some of the features in some of the models. So there’s less model-specific R&D and more common R&D for all products
Also maintenance is cheaper when you reduce things that can break, so lower warranty costs as well.