touareg

I know an old thread, but I love trivia.

Porsche did start taking advice from Toyota or its consultants, can not remember which, for line automation and cost cutting.

For example the 996 is the first Porsche coupe to not have a frame around the door windows, this is an example of advice, from the consultans on how to cut costs at scale.

All the little things can add to production and material costs when at scale. People think it is silly to hear ford reduced a 3 dollar part to 2 but when you sell a million F-150s, that is a lot of money, now imagine if you shave 100 dollars off your production costs per vehicle...

Summer, 1994

"AT THE very thought of his first impressions of Porsche, Chihiro Nakao claps both hands to his head and shakes it vigorously
'It was appalling,' he exclaims. 'Where is the car factory, I asked myself. It looks like a mover's warehouse. And there were no workers, just apes clambering up and down shelves.'

Apes? Warehouses? Is that any way to talk about what Germans consider God's gift to the sports car world? It is if you belong to Shin-Gijutsu, one of the toughest consultant groups around, for whom praise is an inefficient use of energy. Yoshiki Iwata, the group's founder, is equally graceless. 'Everybody here talks of what they have achieved, but I only believe what I see. And most of that is the way we did things in Japan 30 years ago.'"

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/bu...t-1411366.html