Granularity of component sharing

[utopian201]

Hi
I understand that two cars using the same platform will have lower engineering and tooling costs than two cars using different platforms.
Will this extend to engines as well? Eg two engines using the same block (material, stroke, bore) would share tooling and possibly engineering costs. But one may be tuned for economy and the other performance. But how far will this go? Eg would it go down to individual component level?

Eg one car has an I4 with stroke and bore of 86mm and 9.0 compression.
Another car uses a v8 but also has a stroke and bore of 86mm and 9.0 compression.

This means that the machine producing the pistons produces them for both engines, hence tooling costs would be shared for these engines (for the pistons anyway).

It would be pretty cool to be able to leverage economies of scale like that but I'm not sure how it would be managed under the current system. Not sure what the tycoon part looks like, but perhaps an 'inventory' system could be implemented? Eg at the end of each month your company would have an inventory of parts available to go into cars, eg engine blocks, pistons.

Eg a factory produces 2000 86x86x9.0 pistons per day for Engine1. If you designed Engine2 so that it uses those pistons, that Engine2's tooling costs would be less than if you designed Engine2 that uses different sized pistons.

[Daffyflyer]

Inventory of parts, hell no, that'd be horrible to manage.

Cost savings based on similarity of design between two different cars/engines is something we're planning to do to some extent though, yes. Also, there will be engineering time/costs to put a design into production. If it's based on an existing design then it'll be quicker to engineer, based on how similar/different it is to the design it's revised from.

[utopian201]

Say I already have engine1 designed.

Revising engine1 and saving it as engine2 will cost $X

If I create engine3 from scratch and make it identical to engine2, will it also cost $X or more because I didn't 'base' it off engine1?

[Killrob]

It would be compared to the last engine in production at the place you want to build it. It doesn't have to be based on the same engine necessarily - or so at least are the plans.

[Daffyflyer]

It would be compared to the last engine in production at the place you want to build it. It doesn't have to be based on the same engine necessarily - or so at least are the plans.

Yeah, I think it wont matter how you came to that design, only that it's similar to an existing one of yours.

[utopian201]

ah so a factory will only have one production line (ie it can only produce one thing), rather than multiple lines?
it would be cool if there were a production pipeline, but the engine block splits into two pipelines so instead of having to do a costly tooling swtich from say an efficient engine to a race engine, have both at the same time, so there is no cost to switch (because both are used at the same time).

This probably already complicates a complex feature, so being a software dev myself, I'd opt for small releases that actually get shipped rather than something ambitious which has a higher risk of failing.