Expensive engines
Discussion
There was a 962 engine in the back of a Porsche magazine not so long ago, requiring rebuild. £42K. Also, I saw a company called Matsuura at Autosport, machining V8 engine blocks from solid. Each block was $70K. On the other hand, I bought 3 titanium rods for GT3 on Ebay for £2.00 each. Not bad I thought, even if they are only useful as doorstops.
Dan, you should have spent your £12k on something German ;-)
Graham Hill
Dan, you should have spent your £12k on something German ;-)
Graham Hill
I just had a crank, rods, clutch, flywheel and pistons for a Lotus 4 pot all dynamically balanced at Vibration Free for just over £300.
oh, and when Lotus had the sale the Pistons/liners I bought were reduced from around £500 each to £125 each. They were still making profit on them too.
"I would suspect much of the cost though comes from the hand assembly and machining needed to build that kind of engine. Just the cost of balancing can be hideous... "
oh, and when Lotus had the sale the Pistons/liners I bought were reduced from around £500 each to £125 each. They were still making profit on them too.
"I would suspect much of the cost though comes from the hand assembly and machining needed to build that kind of engine. Just the cost of balancing can be hideous... "
Edited by cross-eyed-twit on Thursday 8th March 21:57
Gazboy said:
Just read in the Porsche forums that a GT3 engine costs £28 grand! <br/> <br/>Any other spectaculy expensive engines about?
I am not happy about it ( the cost that is ) but the engine in my Ultima cost that +5G!
It is supposed to be bomb proof but if it ever does go wrong I will need to re mortgage to get it repaired
Some of the parts can be expensive, but the assembly process and testing must make up the majority of the cost.
Let's take the Porsche 911 engine as an example, between the 993 (of which I've owned 3) and the next 996 engines. The 993s were the end of an evolution of air-cooled motors, the 996 was the first in line of a new breed of watercooled motors.
Both were flat sixes, so same number of crankcase, cylinders, heads, manifolds, etc. If anything the watercooled engine should be more complicated due to the waterways and hydraulic systems pumping the water around to the radiators.
However the 993 engines cost a fortune to build, they were highly evolved but in the motor-engineering sense, not in the production-engineering sense. The 996 engines were developed mainly by the production-engineering boys from what I can see. A regular design fault (the dreaded RMS or rear main seal) on the new 996 engines responded with Porsche regularly replacing *entire engine units* rather than mandating a fix to the motor.
This to me shows the clear difference between modern manufacturing-engineering, where components are not replacable or repairable, but entire modules must be replaced (even if a £1.50 seal has gone). As a result, manufacturing-engineering makes the individual modules much cheaper to put together, compared to the manual-labour-intensive method for previous engines.
So a fully dressed 996 engine costs £8k to replace. That's cheap, given they're pretty bloody good engines and made of good materials. A similar engine from the 993 would cost a LOT more to replace.
At the other end, I've got a copy of Faszination Plus with the Ruf Story showing individual human engineers assembling engines (those will be pricey! Ask AdamT how much a new Ruf engine is...), also the video from AMG about their recently-new 6.3 bespoke engine, again individual engineers bolting stuff together, again an expensive engine.
Unless you're doing utterly one-off bespoke parts creation (which is expensive - and Dan Webster's Mini comes into that group IMO), a cheap engine is one that is designed expressly for manufacture, and manufactured by robots. Any engine requiring constant skilled human work to assemble will be expensive, regardless of the components.
An extreme example of this is in haute horlogerie. Bregeut have just released a carousel double tourbillon, which is an incredible feat of micro-engineering. They cost £200k each, and the actual cost of materials (it's a wristwatch, using platinum, gold, silicon, IIRC, and various normal-metal alloys) can't be that extreme, purely because of size. It's all in the skilled assembly. Conversely, Jaeger-le-Coultre have released their Master Tourbillon at £25k. They have obviously designed the tourbillon to be much easier to mass produce, i.e. manufacturing engineering. (sorry for the watch tangent, for those that don't know a tourbillon is an incredibly delicately complex mechanism that rotates the entire escapement round once a minute to reduce gravity effects on watches that are held in one direction most of the time. Utterly essential on pocket watches which stay upright most of the time, but pretty much a high-end show-off feature on a wristwatch, where they aren't really necessary. A flourish of the horological art, perhaps).
Let's take the Porsche 911 engine as an example, between the 993 (of which I've owned 3) and the next 996 engines. The 993s were the end of an evolution of air-cooled motors, the 996 was the first in line of a new breed of watercooled motors.
Both were flat sixes, so same number of crankcase, cylinders, heads, manifolds, etc. If anything the watercooled engine should be more complicated due to the waterways and hydraulic systems pumping the water around to the radiators.
However the 993 engines cost a fortune to build, they were highly evolved but in the motor-engineering sense, not in the production-engineering sense. The 996 engines were developed mainly by the production-engineering boys from what I can see. A regular design fault (the dreaded RMS or rear main seal) on the new 996 engines responded with Porsche regularly replacing *entire engine units* rather than mandating a fix to the motor.
This to me shows the clear difference between modern manufacturing-engineering, where components are not replacable or repairable, but entire modules must be replaced (even if a £1.50 seal has gone). As a result, manufacturing-engineering makes the individual modules much cheaper to put together, compared to the manual-labour-intensive method for previous engines.
So a fully dressed 996 engine costs £8k to replace. That's cheap, given they're pretty bloody good engines and made of good materials. A similar engine from the 993 would cost a LOT more to replace.
At the other end, I've got a copy of Faszination Plus with the Ruf Story showing individual human engineers assembling engines (those will be pricey! Ask AdamT how much a new Ruf engine is...), also the video from AMG about their recently-new 6.3 bespoke engine, again individual engineers bolting stuff together, again an expensive engine.
Unless you're doing utterly one-off bespoke parts creation (which is expensive - and Dan Webster's Mini comes into that group IMO), a cheap engine is one that is designed expressly for manufacture, and manufactured by robots. Any engine requiring constant skilled human work to assemble will be expensive, regardless of the components.
An extreme example of this is in haute horlogerie. Bregeut have just released a carousel double tourbillon, which is an incredible feat of micro-engineering. They cost £200k each, and the actual cost of materials (it's a wristwatch, using platinum, gold, silicon, IIRC, and various normal-metal alloys) can't be that extreme, purely because of size. It's all in the skilled assembly. Conversely, Jaeger-le-Coultre have released their Master Tourbillon at £25k. They have obviously designed the tourbillon to be much easier to mass produce, i.e. manufacturing engineering. (sorry for the watch tangent, for those that don't know a tourbillon is an incredibly delicately complex mechanism that rotates the entire escapement round once a minute to reduce gravity effects on watches that are held in one direction most of the time. Utterly essential on pocket watches which stay upright most of the time, but pretty much a high-end show-off feature on a wristwatch, where they aren't really necessary. A flourish of the horological art, perhaps).
GTWayne said:
Gazboy said:
Just read in the Porsche forums that a GT3 engine costs £28 grand! <br/> <br/>Any other spectaculy expensive engines about?
I am not happy about it ( the cost that is ) but the engine in my Ultima cost that +5G!
It is supposed to be bomb proof but if it ever does go wrong I will need to re mortgage to get it repaired
Well, if it does I'd offer you something with 8 billet titanium rods (under 500 grams) and turbo's for a lot less
Boosted.
justayellowbadge said:
Replacement engine for my 8.32 - £18K 
Cool car (with potential costs as scary as I would have imagine) - what kind of mileage can/do they do? Is the engine a bit fragile for an everyday(ish) saloon?
mybrainhurts said:
Is that the 8.32 to Paddington....?
jezzaaa said:
Have to disagree there, DaGinge. As someone whose Boxster S engine disintegrated six months ago, i can testify that it costs £11000 to replace it!!
What is that special about a boxster engine that makes it that expensive? I'm sure they're amongst the good engines but still relatively mundane.
Coupled with that, those American engines are irritatingly cheap..
It's all rather different, the world of cheap performance cars where, if your engine goes, you blow £500-1000 on a 2nd hand one, to full on performance cars such as these where, if your engine goes, you give up a large percentage of your annual salary. It's easy to say "I could afford a Ferrari 348/Porsche 993 etc" as they're only £25k, but much harder to actually do it and potentially pay for all that stuff.
So what's the cheapest performance car to repair? Is it a Corvette?
What's a Honda NSX like? I know the other Japanese stuff is pretty bad..
Imo, It's all down to production volumes. Porsch engines are very nice inside and extremely well built but so are the latest generation of chevy engines, they just build a lot more of them and the costs are heavily subsidised by the truck engines which are very similar, using the same architecture but made from iron instead of aluminium.
As an example of price. I could get the Chevy ls7 titanium forged con-rods for $100 a piece. Billet titanium rods cost over $500 a piece, are custom made and take 3 months to finish. The quality is vastly superior as is the material. Question has to be, why are the ls7 rods so cheap? I reckon they just forge them in biggish numbers as a job lot which brings the price right down. GM production for all componants runs must be pretty huge.
Boosted.
As an example of price. I could get the Chevy ls7 titanium forged con-rods for $100 a piece. Billet titanium rods cost over $500 a piece, are custom made and take 3 months to finish. The quality is vastly superior as is the material. Question has to be, why are the ls7 rods so cheap? I reckon they just forge them in biggish numbers as a job lot which brings the price right down. GM production for all componants runs must be pretty huge.
Boosted.
I do think that brand Kudos comes into play a great deal.
parts for a Ferrari are astronomical and are really only that high because they want rich people to buy them and hence everyone will assume that only glamorous rich people can afford them.
Ferrari build engines in sufficient numbers to warrant lower prices but will keep them artificially high because of the Kudos element and also to (as used to be the case) fund expensive racing.
Anyone notice who makes vast profits in the automotive business year on year..... Porsche
and they sell LOADS of cars so small volume isn't an excuse.
parts for a Ferrari are astronomical and are really only that high because they want rich people to buy them and hence everyone will assume that only glamorous rich people can afford them.
Ferrari build engines in sufficient numbers to warrant lower prices but will keep them artificially high because of the Kudos element and also to (as used to be the case) fund expensive racing.
Anyone notice who makes vast profits in the automotive business year on year..... Porsche
and they sell LOADS of cars so small volume isn't an excuse.
Gassing Station | General Gassing [Archive] | Top of Page | What's New | My Stuff