The Teardown Artists...

What a load of crap! These people should be reassigned. If GM were designing computers they'd still be at the 68000 level, bemoaning how Apple can use a CPU with 151 million transistors when they can only make one with 70 thousand. Please! Yes the Prius has 74.2% more "parts" than their comparison, the Malibu, but they probably took apart modules without even realizing it and at most Toyota probably put together 5 more "parts" than GM's Malibu on the assembly line. Packaging, GM, packaging!
:huh:

 

The following was included in a wired.com article on April 2005....

http://wired.com/wired/archive/13.04/hybrid.html

"One reason carmakers like to focus on horsepower is that it's damn hard to develop an algorithm that manages a hybrid power train. No company has been able to come up with a formula that beats Toyota's. Ford developed its own algorithm only to realize it was very similar to the Toyota approach; in order to avoid a lawsuit, it ended up purchasing a license rather than pursuing a patent. Mercedes was stunned to discover that its vaunted F 500 Mind concept car, a diesel-electric hybrid, actually got worse mileage on the highway than a gas-only version. Nissan just threw up its arms and licensed nearly all of Toyota's hybrid technology."

 

Indeed, EVERY car company does this with most of the competitors' cars. They measure and document every little bolt; even the WEIGHT of the paint on the car.

 

I love that GM is trying to belittle Toyota for experimenting with technology and then being smart enough to recognize the benefits.

 

The frog comment is very insightful. People buy Toyotas because they are well made and reliable. To learn how that's done, you have to look at the factory, not the finished product; just like if you want to learn where a frog comes from, you need to look at how frogs mate, rather than just disassembling frogs.

To put it another way: the reason none of us would buy a GM car could be readily ascertained by spending a couple of hundred dollars on some basic market research, and has nothing to do with any component in Toyota cars.

Furthermore, no customer cares how many parts are in the car. If Toyota can make a car with 3x as many parts, still have it be reliable, and still beat GM prices and make a profit, then the whole "number of parts" thing is a waste of time to focus on, as it's clearly not the problem or the solution to anything.

 

I was unimpressed with the bias of the article. GM haven't sold a single hydrogen powered car, and are unlikely to do so in the near future. In the mean time they're not engaging in the evolutionary improvements to technology that are needed to actually build production FCV's - which I realized some time ago is the true beauty of the Toyota approach. Yes it's not fuel cells yet, but it incorporates many of the parts and technologies needed to make fuel cells work. But yes, they have manufacturing and supply lines set up to obtain all those components at the prices you need to build a car you can sell.

GM, without a product to sell in the mean time, will not have this, and is in turn going to take a big financial hit when the times comes.

 

More accurately is actually to pull out the ICE and drop in a fuel cell. Fuel cells respond very much like ICE's to demands for power, and so you need the hybrid battery to fill in the gaps.