comments:
There’s a great book that touches on this topic called Car: A drama of the American Workplace It’s about the challenges Ford encountered developing the 1996 “jellybean” Taurus and is a great case study of the tension between design ambition and cost discipline. The 1986 Taurus was a huge hit and the best selling car in its segment for years, so they took a big swing when it was time to redesign the platform. Unfortunately, they fell into this exact trap of “what’s another $X?” and ended up with a car they could not price competitively out of the gate, and Ford spent the subsequent years of the car’s life simplifying the design and engineering and cutting costs. They spent almost $3bln in 1990s dollars on the initial program, absolutely unheard of at the time, and never managed to turn it into a winner. Sure, the design was polarizing, but so was the ‘86. The difference was the ‘86 Taurus undercut the established players in the segment (Accord, Camry) significantly on price, whereas the program costs of the ‘96 led to an MSRP thousands of dollars above those same competitors, pricing it out of the market and tanking sales. I still think if the ‘96 had come out with at least price parity to its peers, it would’ve been a smash hit. “Weird and cheap” often works, “Weird and expensive” typically doesn’t when it comes to mass market products.