Realistic Man Hours

[zd808]

What is a realistic range of man hours to aim for when designing an engine? I guess I mean the real-world equivalent in Automation. I like to keep engines I design realistic instead of just maxing everything out.

I know this can differ in the real world from car to car, brand to brand, because of cheap economy engines versus high performance engines. So, what is a good range for each? I've been assuming <100 for economy type engines and <200 for performance (not super car type engines), but I have nothing to base that off of at all. I'm hoping someone has an idea of how many man hours go into a typical mass-production engine!

[bodi]

I am not really sure what would be a realistic number, but after reproducing a lot of different engines from cars sold here I came to this approximation:

13-18h was the average for the engines inside the cheap 1.0L cars.
19-24h for the mid range (1.4-1.6L) and the 1.6L version of the cheap cars.
25-30h for the mid-high priced cars with engines from 1.8-2.0L
30-40h for the high end stuff
40+ for the engine in cars that costs more than US$100.000

[Daffyflyer]

Yeah, to be honest I'm not sure either. It'll become more clear/get tweaked a bunch once the tycoon side of the game is in place and we have a realistic idea of factory outputs etc.

[Slim Jim]

Mercedes's website says it takes 30 hours to build the spaceframe for the SLS AMG. http://www.mbusa.com/mercedes/vehicles/ ... ystyle-CPE
I also remember reading somewhere that it takes between 2.5-4 hours to assemble an AMG engine... that number is of course the time it takes the engineer to put all the pieces together. It does not include the time it takes to build each piece.

So yea, it'll be interesting to see how it all comes together.

[MaximaSpeed]

What i do is use the quality/tech pool slider. Using 0 as a base of each man hour is 20$ an hour a good wage for a union automotive factory worker. multiply man hours by wage to come up with a price. everything above and below is in increments of 1 dollar an hour so bottom is 5 dollar an hour almost slave labor and top is 35 dollar an hour experienced craftsman. it not a real good base but it make it challenging to compete with the real world prices.

[Reaper392]

What i do is use the quality/tech pool slider. Using 0 as a base of each man hour is 20$ an hour a good wage for a union automotive factory worker. multiply man hours by wage to come up with a price. everything above and below is in increments of 1 dollar an hour so bottom is 5 dollar an hour almost slave labor and top is 35 dollar an hour experienced craftsman. it not a real good base but it make it challenging to compete with the real world prices.

its a nice idea, but when you take into account how much of the work will be done by robots these days it kind of falls over a bit. I don't know exactly how many of the engine making and car making processes have been taken over by robots, but i imagine it is a significant percentage in the later years for cheaper cars.