UK-POLOS.NET - THE VW Polo Forum

lancslad1985 wrote: Tue May 26, 2020 8:21 am The other interesting point is the Arteon is now stock only like the golf mk7. This could be due to a factory closure or maybe canning it as per the CC before it. The Arteon is a lovely car, but it’s basically an Audi A5 for similar money. I like VWs, but they’re not what I’d class as a premium brand compared to Merc, BMW, Audi, Lexus, etc.

monkeyhanger wrote: Tue May 26, 2020 6:21 am

stuartrendall wrote: Tue May 26, 2020 12:42 am Not sure of how much relevance this stat will be but I worked at Toyota for a while who have the highest productivity rate of any car manufacturer and per car the price to make the car was under £1000 including labour, materials and running cost. An unpainted bumper cost only 13pence to manufacture also. The profit from after vehicle sales is extremely lucrative for vehicle manufacturers. Obviously the final price also depends on R&D costs, tax and the dealers cut but would be interesting to see where they break even in a vehicles life cycle.

£1000? I find that extremely hard to believe. 25 years ago I worked at the Ford Transit van plant and they used to post the true cost of building a Transit van on the productivity stats boards - it was about £6500 back then. That did make inclusions for R&D and warranty.

I think you'll find the overall manufacturing cost of most cars to be around 40% of UK RRP for UK spec. They can make them cheaper for other markets by cutting down on tech, putting a less advanced engine in that's already paid off its R&D, steel wheels etc.. They then sell on to the distributor for your region (in this case VW UK for us Brits) who foot the bill for local marketing, warranty and transport. They still need to make a profit. If VW GmbH make more than 50% profit from each car, i'd be amazed.

There's no way in the world an unpainted Toyota bumper costs them 13p. The crude oil needed for one bumper before it is even refined, polymerised and used to make the plastics will cost more than that. Moulding tooling to make those bumpers and maintainance of said tooling, as well as doesn't come cheap and it's an energy intensive process. £15 at the bottom end I could just about believe.

stuartrendall wrote: Tue May 26, 2020 11:40 am

monkeyhanger wrote: Tue May 26, 2020 6:21 am

stuartrendall wrote: Tue May 26, 2020 12:42 am Not sure of how much relevance this stat will be but I worked at Toyota for a while who have the highest productivity rate of any car manufacturer and per car the price to make the car was under £1000 including labour, materials and running cost. An unpainted bumper cost only 13pence to manufacture also. The profit from after vehicle sales is extremely lucrative for vehicle manufacturers. Obviously the final price also depends on R&D costs, tax and the dealers cut but would be interesting to see where they break even in a vehicles life cycle.

£1000? I find that extremely hard to believe. 25 years ago I worked at the Ford Transit van plant and they used to post the true cost of building a Transit van on the productivity stats boards - it was about £6500 back then. That did make inclusions for R&D and warranty.

I think you'll find the overall manufacturing cost of most cars to be around 40% of UK RRP for UK spec. They can make them cheaper for other markets by cutting down on tech, putting a less advanced engine in that's already paid off its R&D, steel wheels etc.. They then sell on to the distributor for your region (in this case VW UK for us Brits) who foot the bill for local marketing, warranty and transport. They still need to make a profit. If VW GmbH make more than 50% profit from each car, i'd be amazed.

There's no way in the world an unpainted Toyota bumper costs them 13p. The crude oil needed for one bumper before it is even refined, polymerised and used to make the plastics will cost more than that. Moulding tooling to make those bumpers and maintainance of said tooling, as well as doesn't come cheap and it's an energy intensive process. £15 at the bottom end I could just about believe.

I can assure you that less than £1000 (although not much less) was the real cost not including tax, dealers cut and external costs to the company. Toyota had an extremely efficient and complicated production line and they used to love to flaunt their statistics. The efficiency percentage in the area that I worked in was 99.8% and if it dropped to 99.7% that would be a bad day and people would have to do over time. Also at Toyota they have the fastest bumper injection process of all manufacturers with VW even having a tour around to see how it worked. We used to change the 20 tonne moulds on a machine in less than 40 seconds compared to 3 hours at most other plants around the world thanks to the clever machines. Because of how fast and smart the machines were, making bumpers wafer thin 2 bumpers every few seconds the price per bumper was around 13p without anything on them.

I remember once the process was so quick the static from the pipes that the plastic pellets were transferred to caused a fire. It is a crazy thing to see in person those machines.

stuartrendall wrote: Tue May 26, 2020 5:28 pm The labour costs for the full car is spread per car as each car spends less than 60 seconds per employee and the majority of the process is automated such as pressing, welding etc. And the process of making a bumper is completely automated. I myself was maintenance there for a while and from experience there isn't a huge amount of employees. Only in the assembly area is there a large amount of employees and in the transport area but everywhere else doesn't have a huge amount. It is a mesmerising process to watch a car work its way through the plant.

monkeyhanger wrote: Tue May 26, 2020 7:32 pm

stuartrendall wrote: Tue May 26, 2020 5:28 pm The labour costs for the full car is spread per car as each car spends less than 60 seconds per employee and the majority of the process is automated such as pressing, welding etc. And the process of making a bumper is completely automated. I myself was maintenance there for a while and from experience there isn't a huge amount of employees. Only in the assembly area is there a large amount of employees and in the transport area but everywhere else doesn't have a huge amount. It is a mesmerising process to watch a car work its way through the plant.

I did just spread an educated cost for the Nissan plant across all the cars made at their best output and it's pushing on for over £400 per vehicle. If their output goes down and their staffing levels stay up, staffing cost per car goes even higher. Wide diversity of people in a csr plant supporting the operation as a whole- maintenance engineers for the equipment, tooling and robots, robot programmers, operators, shift leaders, line design engineers, project managers, cleaners, security, canteen staff, IT, HR.... the list goes on. All those wages need to be accounted for. All the tooling has a purchase cost and an ongoing maintenance cost, with acquisition cost spread over a number of years for even expenditure.

I worked at Ford Southampton seasonally for 5 years while I did my A-levels and degree. Bodyshop pressing and welding was mainly automated with an inspection and correction crew at the end of the process. The corrosion protection and paint shop.again was pretty much automated apart from maintenance, but once you get into assembly, it's mainly people screwing in everything bolted to the interior with air tools and lining up axles/drivetrain as the robots carry the load.

Efficiency has improved a fair bit with careful planning of processes - all the big players are pretty efficient. Not quite at Toyota/Nissan/Honda levels, but only a few % away in most cases.

There's a lot of theft in these places - the employee car park used to be across a nain road from the plant. The security guards were also fully trained firefighters and paramedics - they were on £25 an hour 20 years ago.

They rushed out one day for a Ford employee collapsed in the middle of the road going back to his car after his shift. They pulled his coat off to give him CPR, only to find 2 starter motors joined by a cord, hung around his neck under his coat - he'd knocked himself out cutting off his blood supply. Another time 3 new vans peeled away from a transport convoy to Barton Park. The stolen vans were recovered very quickly, they had a new design of wing mirror that hadn't made it onto any retail vans yet.

All the parts back then that were bought in were generally procured at around 15% RRP e.g. todays prices, £80 battery at Halfords is £12, £15 for an 18" tyre, about £35 per 18" alloy wheel etc.

Even with the relatively cheap labour it the VW SA plant, I doubt they make a Polo GTI+ for less than £6k cost to the plant. If VW could name a £23k car for £1000 or even £2k, they wouldn't be €200Bn in debt, they'd be swimming around in hold like Scrooge Mc Duck.