He starts with a rear steering system. A Chinese OEM will take it off the shelf and put it straight into the vehicle, because no driver can tell which program it was originally developed for. Marginal engineering cost, marginal capital cost, and they run with it. That is not what happens in Europe or the US.
Then he goes to the specification book. A hundred-year story of developing cars, pages added for good reasons, until it passed what a customer can feel, see, or perceive. He describes his own engineers driving a vehicle developed in another region and calling it no good on noise and vibration and asymmetric behavior, while buyers in that market take it by the hundreds of thousands. As Jan puts it, the average person buying a car is not an NVH engineer.
His conclusion is blunt. A lot of cost is going into the equation that does not create value, and the newer players found a better formula because their specifications never had a hundred years to grow.
Watch the full conversation with Ramiro Gutierrez: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SDUEtlnc5Q
#AutomotiveIndustry #ChineseOEMs #AutomotiveEngineering #ZF #AutomotiveLeadership
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The Automotive Leaders Podcast is hosted by Jan Griffiths, the champion for culture change in the automotive industry. From a farm in Wales to the C-suite of a $3 billion Tier-1 supplier, Jan built her career inside this industry. Now she's out to transform it.
Her argument is blunt. The pressure on this industry isn't letting up. The survivors will be the ones who reinvent how they work. Speed wins. Everyone else gets left behind.
Every episode, Jan sits down with the leaders driving that change. Real conversations about tariffs, supply chain shocks, EV uncertainty, AI, and the shift from command-and-control to authentic, human-centered leadership.
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