Tearing Down the Competition

Ford calls the process shown below "value analysis"; International Harvester gives it the title of "competitive analysis"; General Motors and Chrysler will not even discuss the subject. But it is no secret that all these companies routinely tear their competitors' products to pieces, not just verbally but physically. As soon as a new car or truck appears on the market, the other vehicle manufacturers regularly rush to buy one. Then they send it to a "teardown room," where the vehicle is put through a kind of disassembly line and torn into as many as 15,000 pieces that are hung on huge pegboards. Engineers study every part and piece to determine if it is somehow superior to their own company's product. They also analyze how much it would cost to imitate the design in their own plants.

As a result, manufacturing secrets rarely keep for long in Detroit. A few years ago, for example, Ford men concluded that a competitor was building a superior master brake cylinder. They designed a similar one, but modified it to use two bolts instead of four. Sure enough, two years later they found their two-bolt design appearing in the brake cylinders of the competitors' cars that they dismantled. At present, auto engineers are focusing particular attention on how rivals go about reducing the weight of their cars in order to placate a public increasingly concerned by the cost of gas guzzlers in a fuel-short society. Since foreign-car makers generally tend to build smaller vehicles than the Americans do, the teardown experts are devoting special emphasis to ripping apart and examining every Toyota, Audi or Taunus that they can get their socket wrenches on.

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