
A Company That Tears Cars Apart to Find Out How They're Built - dmmalam
https://jalopnik.com/the-fascinating-company-that-tears-cars-apart-to-find-o-1787205420
======
Luc
A fun comparison:

Munro on the BMW i3:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqiBWfsDTAA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqiBWfsDTAA)

Munro on the Tesla Model 3:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCIo8e12sBM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCIo8e12sBM)

~~~
sxates
One of those companies is a multi-million dollar client for them, and one is
not.

~~~
Bluestrike2
I've seen similar comments everywhere I stumbled across this story. It's an
easy takeaway, but that's not how automakers look at competitive benchmarking.
Working with a company like Munro is an engineering decision. Munro breaks
cars down, reverse engineers everything they possibly can, and draws as many
conclusions about production methods as possible. Engineers with other
automakers use this data to learn from how others approach problems.

The engineers don't give a damn about a Munro PR video about a competitor,
period. It's a complete non-issue for them, and the same goes for their
managers who are the ones who decide to work with Munro. They want to know
every detail about how all the sausage is made (or what the sausage actually
is). They don't care if the car is well made or poorly made; they're focused
on the _how_ ; after all, even a car with severe quality control issues can
offer useful insights. Besides, every peculiar (or even dumb) design or
manufacturing decision they've made was previously laid bare by companies like
Munro. Think of the process as something more like peer review or a morbidity
and mortality conference for doctors. It's not a public process, despite
something like this video.

Basically, the people who _would_ care if Munro upset the company by speaking
favorably about Tesla are the people who have no involvement in whether their
company works with Munro in the first place. If someone from Ford marketing
told Ford engineering to quit working with Munro because of a video, they'd be
laughed at and promptly ignored.

~~~
icc97
The stuff that Munro is pointing out is so fundamental that I don't see how
there's bias in it. The craziness that there is some hidden circle underneath
the front hatch that you have to know to open and pull out a couple of leads
to attach to a 12V battery is maddening. The fire department would _have_ to
do this to be able to cut the cable that's in the front hatch.

I can see there being a Model 3 recall over that kind of stuff. What's the
point of over the air software updates if your hardware is unsafe.

~~~
maxerickson
I'm curious what first responders think. I search a bit and found some Ford
info, I looked at the 2013 electric focus here:

[https://www.nfpa.org/Training-and-Events/By-
topic/Alternativ...](https://www.nfpa.org/Training-and-Events/By-
topic/Alternative-Fuel-Vehicle-Safety-Training/Emergency-Response-Guides/Ford)

The battery disconnect procedures there, using the high voltage service
disconnects, start with lowering the back seat or jacking up the rear of the
car.

Tesla provides the location of the little access panel on the quick response
sheet here:

[https://www.tesla.com/firstresponders](https://www.tesla.com/firstresponders)

Requiring 12 volts to pop the hood is not great but it doesn't seem to be that
much of a departure either.

~~~
icc97
If you compare it to having a lever by the driver as in any other car, that's
2 seconds to do vs them having to search on the Internet / find documents in
the car then find the hole then connect up a battery.

The car could be upside down or on a very steep hill. It all seems pretty
frightening stuff. You're basically just praying you don't have a serious
crash which is back to the 60s.

I don't think that emergency procedures should be matched to other electric
vehicles they should be matched to existing ICE cars.

~~~
vsl
What’s up with the fixation on connecting to 12V? Don’t you need to DISconnect
and not the 12V,but the high voltage one?

That’s not a difficult procedure: open the hood (forcefully if need be, latch
is in the front), cut the wire in the place marked in bright orange and
labeled accordingly - and immediately visible and accessible upon opening the
hood.

------
tomcam
Or they could just rent a car and disassemble it without the owner’s
knowledge, as Mercedes is alleged to have done …
[https://jalopnik.com/mercedes-parent-company-daimler-
dismant...](https://jalopnik.com/mercedes-parent-company-daimler-dismantled-a-
rented-tes-1820961392)

~~~
michaelt
I guess I don't understand the surprise about this?

In the 1970s my father worked at a company that supplied parts to car
manufacturers, and it was a normal thing - if Company X say they want a
backlit switch with the clicky feel of a Company Y Model Z, they hired a
Company Y Model Z, took the switch off and measured it.

According to my father, the car industry and the car rental industry all know
this is commonplace.

------
vinceguidry
This is the sort of thing that makes my eyes roll and my attention wander
whenever politicos hammer on about the loss of our manufacturing base being
America's imminent downfall.

The amount of institutional knowledge baked into our industries is simply
mind-boggling. The only reason we can get away with outsourcing manufacturing
in the first place is because this knowledge is so amazingly thorough.

~~~
ggg9990
We have transferred a TON of this institutional knowledge to China. Now
companies like DJI can compete and beat us, and it’s all with knowledge that
we transferred to them in the last 30 years.

~~~
com2kid
> Now companies like DJI can compete and beat us

DJI hires high quality Chinese engineers. Their software is better than what
American consumer drone companies manage to push out, and they can push the
latest tech to market _insanely_ quick, as GoPro learned the hard way when
they found out DJI was a half generation ahead of them on drone tech.

DJI has great customer service, an amazing insurance plan that provides piece
of mind, and bullet proof build quality.

They do have a major advantage of being in China, so they can work with
suppliers much more directly. It doesn't feel like they are using the grey
technology market though. A lot of the lower priced drones are obviously put
together from Shenzen part bins, but DJI just feels good all around.

That said, their Android mobile app is a bit janky at times. Then again, lots
of stuff on Android is a bit janky...

~~~
plantain
This is patently untrue - DJI has some of the worst customer service I have
ever experienced, especially for a 1000$ device. I spent two months calling
every other day trying to resolve a hardware issue and ended up issuing a
chargeback before getting any attention.

Go read the DJI hardware/software support forums.

Never. Again.

~~~
xemoka
They're great for a toy or a hobbyist, but companies or anyone who relies on
the drone tech should look elsewhere. I can relate to awful customer support
and even strange software problems that are refused to exist by DJI.

------
dajohnson89
Haynes makes manuals for every car just about (in the US at least), and I'm
pretty sure they do a complete tear-down and rebuild for each one.

[https://haynes.com/en-us/](https://haynes.com/en-us/)

~~~
Arbalest
That's a teardown that a mechanic can use, this is about a teardown an
engineer (or engineering team) can use.

------
mutagen
With more and more functionality moving into software, is Munro or anyone else
doing anything along these lines with the firmware and software in vehicles?
Are manufacturers as interested in evaluating the process and design of their
software as they are with the physical pieces of the vehicle? Do copyright and
sometimes murky legalities around reverse engineering software prevent the
equivalent teardown (disassembly) and analysis of software components?

Despite being known for kaizen processes implemented as Plan -> Do -> Check ->
Act or 5 Whys, Toyota's issues with unintended acceleration were partly blamed
on flaws and spaghetti code in the RTOS controlling their Electronic Throttle
Control System in some models:

[https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~koopman/pubs/koopman14_toyota_ua_...](https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~koopman/pubs/koopman14_toyota_ua_slides.pdf)
[http://www.safetyresearch.net/blog/articles/toyota-
unintende...](http://www.safetyresearch.net/blog/articles/toyota-unintended-
acceleration-and-big-bowl-%E2%80%9Cspaghetti%E2%80%9D-code)

That's just one example. There's the CAN bus car hacking via OnStar and more
examples out there. Would this kind of analysis help more than say, simply
implementing better software development methodologies?

~~~
m0th87
Here’s a talk of someone who’s reverse engineered CAN buses and made a python
library to help:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bZNhMcv4Y8&app=desktop](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bZNhMcv4Y8&app=desktop)

------
Hasz
I'm amazed they sell all that info for just $150,000. I figure there's around
~125 major automakers in the world, maybe a dozen or two or so big enough to
own their own labs. For each 23,000 page document, we're only taking ~15M,
max. For a team of manufacturing experts, this just isn't that much cash.

I suspect a majority of their cash flow comes from those training seminars,
and the $150K book is just to get you in the door and interested.

I would love to see a breakdown of their revenue.

~~~
mywittyname
They don't just sell to major auto makers. Governments are a huge customer.
OEM suppliers are another big one, they don't buy the comprehensive reports,
just component reports.

I heard the owner/chief engineer give a talk a while ago, specifically about
the i3, and he said the report was originally priced at $500k for the full
thing. So it's possible that the price of these reports drop with age.

Edit: they also do perform costing on a contract basis. So an OEM will
actually pay them to tear down a competitor vehicle, and Munro reserves the
rights to sell that report too.

------
larrydag
Ironic that is perfectly okay by manufacturers for someone to disassemble
their car yet electronics companies go nuts and sue you.

[https://spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/conservation/why-we-
mus...](https://spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/conservation/why-we-must-fight-
for-the-right-to-repair-our-electronics)

~~~
kuschku
This is why the EU made disassembling software a right for certain use cases,
because it's standard practice in all other industries, it is unreasonable to
ban it in software.

------
salgernon
I wonder if they acknowledge any responsibility if their tear-downs reveal
recallable design defects? Not that I'd want them to be persecuted, but they'd
be in a great position to notice that something may be under-spec'd for a
given workload.

The article also didn't mention any reverse engineering of the software - I'm
sure someone could clone the physical parts of an i3 and have a vastly
substandard product because without a thorough understanding of the
software...

~~~
mschuster91
> I wonder if they acknowledge any responsibility if their tear-downs reveal
> recallable design defects?

Why should anyone be held responsible to find a flaw in a 3rd party product
and not report it? It might be considered unethical if a life-threatening
issue, yes, but IMHO there is no way to attach legal responsibility.

------
bwang29
I developed new appreciation for car manufacturing from this article. The way
that one component depends on other common components reminded me of NPM
packages.

I'm wondering what if they found one car infringing another car's design or
engineering IP without fulfilling a license, or if they would find certain car
makers "reinvent the wheel" simultaneously. A lot of car makers need to
properly license certain design from other car makers. I wonder if this also
helps facilitating and defending these licensable designs, or encouraging open
sourcing design in cars.

I suspect the overall outcome of finding similar design and borrow existing
design from one car maker into another is a good thing for bringing the cost
down.

~~~
mschuster91
Most car components actually do not come from the car manufacturer. For
example: Bosch (which is famous for its drilling machines) is also a common
manufacturer of engine control units and other parts and got flak for it
during the diesel scandal, Knorr Bremse is an industry supplier for brakes on
trucks and buses and Takata a supplier of airbags.

Takata actually is the perfect example: no matter what car manufacturer there
is, they all ended up on the infamous airbag recall list:
[https://www.nhtsa.gov/recall-spotlight/takata-air-
bags](https://www.nhtsa.gov/recall-spotlight/takata-air-bags)

------
sharpercoder
Should not the government require manufacturers to extensively document all
the parts and materials that go into a product? In this age, we should demand
that products are easily (re/up/down)cycle-able, and this means third parties
should be able to efficiently dismantle products.

~~~
jerkstate
If the regulatory burden for starting a new car company was _that_ high, you
would have never seen Tesla, which means you would never see any pressure on
the big guys to go all electric. So you need to balance regulation with
innovation.

~~~
xcvbxzas
That does not seem like much of a burden, at all.

All of that information is required knowledge for the business to operate and
production to continue. You can't make something if you don't even know what
materials you need to make it, nor if you don't know how to put it together.

In the case of extremely low production with hand-fitting the documented
process may vary some from the actual process but it shouldn't be so
significant that one product does not even resemble another.

------
ramy_d
what about software? I'm reminded of what farmers have to go through with John
Deere tractors
[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8JCh0owT4w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8JCh0owT4w)].
Isn't that going to start happening with cars (I thought this was already
happening). Are they going to reverse engineer that too?

~~~
PoachedSausage
Probably easier to just pay someone that specialises in breaking into
corporate networks to get the source code to give to your own devs.

------
userbinator
It's very interesting to look at the number and complexity of parts in even an
extremely old and thus much simpler car, then contrast it to cars today with
at least 2 orders of magnitude more; this one for 1929-32 Chevrolets, for
example, is already over 300 pages:

[http://chevy.oldcarmanualproject.com/parts/1929_32/index.htm...](http://chevy.oldcarmanualproject.com/parts/1929_32/index.html)

...and from it we can also glean somewhat surprising historical facts, such as
the fact that pistons were $1.75 each:
[http://chevy.oldcarmanualproject.com/parts/1929_32/2932mppl0...](http://chevy.oldcarmanualproject.com/parts/1929_32/2932mppl002.html)

------
igitur
So you're saying that, unlike me, if they try to put it all back together, no
parts will be left lying around at the end?

------
kazinator
But you're a criminal if you disassemble an executable.

------
gadders
I'd have loved to have seen some footage of them actually dismantling stuff,
to see how they do it without damaging items, special techniques they use etc.

------
72deluxe
I did work experience for Rover many years ago and they had a department that
took competitor's cars apart to see how they were built and how much they
could build the cars for. Some cars were selling for much more than their
assembly and parts cost.

I think a lot of manufacturers did this.

------
mc32
I was under the impression all car MFGs did their own tear-downs as well to
ensure or at least gauge how easy/difficult it is to recycle a car. The car
"green" effort back in the mid 90s.

------
known
Least expensive cars to maintain

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11879869](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11879869)

[https://www.yourmechanic.com/article/the-most-and-least-
expe...](https://www.yourmechanic.com/article/the-most-and-least-expensive-
cars-to-maintain-by-maddy-martin)

------
everyone
Everyone would save time if the car companies just sold the schematics of
their cars to each other.

------
erokar
I read cats.

------
baud147258
I'm pretty sure I've already read this, from HN. Oh well it's good enough that
I don't mind re reading it.

