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Been thinking recently about the varying qualities of cars out the box and despite disagreeing with Mope about whether cars straight out of the box are suitable for racing I do have a certain sympathy with what I assume to be his view that cars should be closer out of the box. I believe Mope thinks they are already are close out of the box, I don't and wish they were. That doesn't actually affect this train of thought though.
Something we always say when this comes up is that the cars are toys and built to a budget prices of around £28-30 quid which is very little in real terms (for example - a tank of petrol at extortionate "cripple the transport industry and bugger the consequences" UK prices, a not-quite-brand new console game, cheap pair of jeans, an evening out with taxi home etc.). It's therefore asking too much that they should be manufactured to the tolerance of an expensive watch or a CD player.
Now all the manufacturers have QA processes and presumably products are checked to see that they work and scrapped or sent back to the shop floor for rework if they don't meet the required standards.
So what are these standards and what or who decides them. Has there been a meeting in the boardrooms of Hornby, Fly, TechniToys etc. where some big wig has pointed to a graph and said "We can QA to this level of tolerance, any less will damage our reputation in the market, any more and it will cut into the profit margin and prices will have to go up." I wonder if there has been a conscious decision as to where on a graph of cost against benefit the level of QAing has been sited.
(Slighty off topic example that illustrates this - my father was run into in his C-class but Mercedes UK wouldn't approve the release of the repaired car from a local Merc dealership until a roving engineer had visited the car and approved the work. This clearly costs a lot of money to do but I guess they feel the benefits are worthwhile. Compare to a friend whose repaired Clio 16v came back from a Renault dealership with a boot that opened, but then wouldn't shut...)
What I am asking is that if cars cost, for arguments sake, twice as much, would the quality of them and their closeness in performance to each other (for supposedly identical cars) be closer? Could our hypothetical point of 'optimum QA' be shifted further along the graph and we have better, more expensive cars into the bargain?
How much would it cost for a car if they were manufactured to a level where they all behaved well on wood, or without the magnet and the motors were identical and they need no tyre truing at the moment? I do have some cars that do this (a £15 Dallara for example) but we all know that to get a really good car you generally have to buy two or three of them.
I suspect I may be asking something unanswerable but I'd be interested to know if anyone (perhaps someone with a manfacturing background) could provide a quick stab at the figures. I see RC cars in the local model shop that cost from £200 - £400 and I wonder if the, for want of a better word, tolerance is much tighter than on a £30 slotcar.
Coop
Something we always say when this comes up is that the cars are toys and built to a budget prices of around £28-30 quid which is very little in real terms (for example - a tank of petrol at extortionate "cripple the transport industry and bugger the consequences" UK prices, a not-quite-brand new console game, cheap pair of jeans, an evening out with taxi home etc.). It's therefore asking too much that they should be manufactured to the tolerance of an expensive watch or a CD player.
Now all the manufacturers have QA processes and presumably products are checked to see that they work and scrapped or sent back to the shop floor for rework if they don't meet the required standards.
So what are these standards and what or who decides them. Has there been a meeting in the boardrooms of Hornby, Fly, TechniToys etc. where some big wig has pointed to a graph and said "We can QA to this level of tolerance, any less will damage our reputation in the market, any more and it will cut into the profit margin and prices will have to go up." I wonder if there has been a conscious decision as to where on a graph of cost against benefit the level of QAing has been sited.
(Slighty off topic example that illustrates this - my father was run into in his C-class but Mercedes UK wouldn't approve the release of the repaired car from a local Merc dealership until a roving engineer had visited the car and approved the work. This clearly costs a lot of money to do but I guess they feel the benefits are worthwhile. Compare to a friend whose repaired Clio 16v came back from a Renault dealership with a boot that opened, but then wouldn't shut...)
What I am asking is that if cars cost, for arguments sake, twice as much, would the quality of them and their closeness in performance to each other (for supposedly identical cars) be closer? Could our hypothetical point of 'optimum QA' be shifted further along the graph and we have better, more expensive cars into the bargain?
How much would it cost for a car if they were manufactured to a level where they all behaved well on wood, or without the magnet and the motors were identical and they need no tyre truing at the moment? I do have some cars that do this (a £15 Dallara for example) but we all know that to get a really good car you generally have to buy two or three of them.
I suspect I may be asking something unanswerable but I'd be interested to know if anyone (perhaps someone with a manfacturing background) could provide a quick stab at the figures. I see RC cars in the local model shop that cost from £200 - £400 and I wonder if the, for want of a better word, tolerance is much tighter than on a £30 slotcar.
Coop
