Originally posted by ZoomZoom Diva: The 1978 Thunderbird offered 5 colors of moonroof tint to match the vinyl roof, three engines (302, 351, 400), three seating configurations (solid bench, split bench, buckets) with additional variations. The 1982 Thunderbird had over 10,000 possible configurations.
Which is precisely why the Japanese kicked our asses.
The Japanese came over and offered only a couple versions of every model. You had almost no options on top of the version you chose. You got nothing or you got everything and maybe there was a version in between. It vastly lowers costs of production and significantly increases your reliability. Industrial Engineering 101.
The more possible combinations of components the less reliable the end-product. Plain and simple. Not only does it become more and more difficult and expensive to test every possible combination, but the man putting it together will never put 3 different things together as well as if you just gave him one thing to put together. You exponentially increase your problems in the future and you have support personnel, dealer mechanics, that must be trained on an exponentially higher number of power-/drivetrain combinations.
Then there's the biggie -- inventory. Every combination results in an exponential increase in inventory. At any given time there's almost $100 billion in automobile manufacting inventory out there. Increases are not treated lightly because the quantities are never small.
You might think that if you go from 1 to 2 engines it doesn't matter because the total number of engines in your inventory would stay the same you'd just have a smaller number of each. But it doesn't work that way. If you have 1000 engines in inventory with one option you might need 1500 when you have 2 options and 2000 when you have 3 options, just to maintain the same service levels. And with more engines you have more drive trains. And more electrical harnesses. And more ECUs. And numerous other things as well.
And then, for example, you decide you want to make Automatic Climate Control an option on every vehicle instead of just the V6 models. Now you went from a potential option on 30% of your production to a potential option on 100% of your production. Your needed inventories on that component just grew exponentially, by far from than the three times your potentially-equipped vehicles grew. You went from having to hold 1000 ACC units to holding 5000 ACC units, which you now have to purchase, find some place to store, and pay taxes on five times the quantity you did have to. Your cash-to-cash cycle time probably just went down the toilet unless you have very forgiving suppliers willing to absorb those costs themselves.
Oh, and you need a different wiring harness for that component. And it's dependent on your engine harness; an option that you also increased exponentially with the added engine options you wanted. This is why almost all, if not all, Contours came with the Fog Light plugs hanging on them whether their model could even get the lights or not -- it was cheaper and far easier to stick the same harness in every car than to use a different one.
And you do that for dozens or hundreds of different options, increasing the total needed inventory for your one facility by hundreds of millions of dollars overnight. It's a whole lot easier to do than you think.
And then you have to actually put all these cars together in a just-in-time manufacturing environment so that, when an in-process car gets to it's workstation the needed part is already there waiting for it. A part that was different from the last and will be different from the next, which will be different from the next dependent on whatever options and exact combination of options that particular car was ordered with. The more options you have, the harder and harder it is to guarantee that the needed component arrives at the needed workstation precisely when it is needed.
