A car design odyssey: Part one

Let’s define the finishing line of this marathon first. SOP, in my definition, means starting the production of legally homologated or ‘type-approved’ cars that you are prepared to sell to a member of the public, for real money. It seems to be a fairly clear definition, does it not? But in the last decade or so it’s become surprisingly unclear. 

I don’t want to call out any specific culprits for muddying what were previously pretty clear waters, but suffice it to say my definition of SOP does not mean being ready to produce some cosmetically okay-ish looking cars that are used as company hacks by members of your own senior management, or are ‘sold’ to the first cousin of the production plant manager, or to fanboys and girls who have signed NDAs promising not to complain if the damn thing goes pop after a week or two. 

SOP also does not mean the day you arrange that cheesy photograph of you handing over the keys to a proudly grinning ‘customer’ at the end of the production line, your team members beaming and holding up a sign saying ‘Car Number 000001!’, only for that car to be slowly driven into a workshop immediately after the photo to be rebuilt some time later into something resembling the finished thing. 

You can easily see how even the definition of the SOP or Job One finishing line has become a little confused. Add to that sloppy use of such ambiguous words as ‘launched’ (further qualified by ‘static’ or ‘dynamic’), ‘presented’, ‘previewed’ or even the seemingly innocuous ‘shown’, and you can see that certain manufacturers have managed to create a pretty effective smokescreen concealing the true date of their SOPs. 

In fact, the practice has even spawned a new phrase – the cringeworthy ‘soft SOP’, which is a beautifully vague milestone, concealing all the above tricks for claiming that you are in production when you’re actually not – at least, not yet. So, for the avoidance of further doubt and for the purposes of this article, we are talking about the real thing here: real cars, rolling off a real production line, to be shipped to real customers who’ve paid real money and will rightfully raise hell if the car is not right. That, dear readers, is Start of Production.

Right, let’s back up. Unfortunately, the start-line for this race is also as clear as a line scraped in the mud by an unsteadily wandering boot-toe. My definition? It’s the milestone known as Concept Kick Off (or some similar term…various OEMs have their own preferred Three Letter Acronym). 

This means that you have confirmed that you want to build a car. You have some idea of what it will be – whether that be a sports car, a family hatch, a rugged 4×4, whatever. You’ve done some business case studies of what volumes you might be able to sell, in what price range, in which global territories and to whom. 

You’ve probably decided the rough powertrain outline, be that electric, hybrid or even a good ol’ ICE. But you have not got a full-size clay model to show off as you announce the ‘start’ of your exciting new project. You most certainly do not have a full-size concept vehicle from whose slinky curves you can dramatically whip an embroidered satin cover, to the applause of the admiring press and the flash of a thousand Insta-bulbs. If you have either of these, in fact, you started the project months, if not years before you claim to have done so.

Now we’ve got the boring definitions out of the way, let’s get back to the numbers. Like 48. That’s the number of months most car makers will need for an all-new platform, powertrain and ‘Top Hat’ (where upper structures are varied to spin different body shapes off the same platform) combination. It will be significantly quicker for a mere ‘reskin’ of an existing platform and powertrain combo. 

Most German manufacturers move at a slower cadence – for various reasons that would take too much space to explain here, the German Big Five did not follow the mainly Japanese-led move to all-digital prototyping in the late Nineties, choosing to stick to a more traditional physical prototyping phase before committing to ‘hard’ production tools. 

As a result, their timescales are closer to five years, maybe as long as seven for ‘special’ halo vehicles where quality and technology are more important than simple Time-to-Market – think Mercedes S-Class. At the other end of the scale, the more aggressive and risk-hungry startups, especially those based in China, are genuinely getting close to 36 months – maybe flirting with 38-40 months, but getting closer to three years than four.

Hold up. ‘But I heard just last week from Exceptionally Fast Motors Limited that their new 2000bhp hypercar took only a year to launch? The CEO even pulled the covers off a real car and said he was ready to take orders! What the hell’s Twohig on about?’

I’m very conscious of extending my already protuberant neck yet further here, but I would confidently argue that anyone claiming to have brought a car to market within 30 months is either talking out of their (top) hat, or not using the same definitions of start and finish. In other words, they’re not really starting the clock at zero and they are not talking about a real SOP, but rather some kind of ‘soft SOP’, as described above.

(If anyone has evidence of a mass-production project – all-new, mind – that took less than 36 months from kick-off to a real SOP, I would be genuinely curious to know more about it. And happy to be proven wrong!) 

In the second part of this article, I’ll explain just why – thanks to various pesky physical phenomena – the whole process takes so very, very long.

Read part two