Paddles B'mere said..
Hey FN, I reckon it could be engineered quite easily, but we would probably find that the margin (profit on sale) is so low on their new cars that it would become uncompetitive economically to convert cars to RHD as opposed to cars that are RHD straight off the production line. I believe that GM are still going to offer the Corvette as RHD because they will produce them as RHD on a parallel line and they will not require conversion post assembly line. I think their policy is that they cannot afford to have duplicated assembly lines for RHD and LHD so they abandoned RHD and chose to service their own domestic market and any other LHD drive country because it is more economically efficient for them. I can only assume that manufacturers such as VW Group can produce both LHD and RHD because they are more economically efficient at production than GM and so have bigger margins to play with.
Yeah, I was thinking about this earlier as I was driving my Nissan Elgrand and thought 'hang on, the Japanese have been building RHD and LHD of the same models for ages'. To be fair they have the volume now where they can have enough for each side, but they have demonstrated that its not a big thing.
I just don't get it though. Its not that different. Even the bits and pieces that you find in most cars in different markets share quite a few common parts or part designs. I strongly suspect that in a lot of cases Holden has gone to a local manufacturer here and said 'we have this widget here from head office, what would it cost to tool up and make us 100,000 of them?' The parts are the same, just made in different countries.
I think Holden Engine Company was making certain engines for different markets around the world.
I think it would be better in some ways to have the car stamped out in the US and shipped here for assembly as a RHD model, which sounds like it was the way things were done here many years ago anyway.
I still think it would be easy to design it so that even if you have to disassemble a completed car and convert it, it wouldn't be too hard... but I could be wrong and its a moot point anyway.
I was a bit surprised in the past when Ford Australia were proudly saying that they spent X number of $M on designing the "all new Falcon" when it just looked like a ripoff of a US or Euro model. No doubt that a lot of cost gets eaten up in small changes, but I do wonder whether it is bad design or just what it costs.
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