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Originally Posted by Bhobbs
Doesn't that defeat the purpose of platform sharing? They will sell way more Alpha based Camaros than they sell of the ATS so there shouldn't be any reason not to use lightweight components on the Camaro.
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Not really. Odds are they won't share a single body panel or piece of interior trim. Since they have to be different, it won't really cost them anything extra in the design & engineering.
And it doesn't really matter how many units you sell, it will not change the fact that steel is cheap, aluminum is not, and carbon fibre definitely is not.
For example, lets say a die for a particular part cost $25,000. Over the entire production run of the Camaro, it would crank out something on the order 500,000 units. Thats a tooling cost of $0.05/part. On the ATS, the total volume might only be 100,000 units (assuming its not unique to the -V). But thats still only $0.25/part. Steel costs $0.30 to $0.40 per pound last I checked. Aluminum is about triple that, but an aluminum part of equal strength to steel usually weighs about 60% of the steel part so it works out on a equal component basis to a bit less than twice as expensive. So on all but the smallest, cheapest parts material cost is going to be the driving factor in price -rather than tooling.
Some of the things that are buried a bit deeper (out of sight/out of mind), like the steering mechanism and HVAC system will probably have quite a bit of commonality between the Camaro & ATS. But parts sharing is only a portion of the cost saved in platform sharing. A lot of it comes down the the bare-bones basic engineering. The stuff that few outside of the industry give a second thought to. How do the motor mounts tie into the frame? How do we stop the roof from collapsing in a rollover? Where can we route the fluid & electrical lines? Its a lot cheaper to do that once for a small window of variance than it is to do it 4 or 5 times for 4 or 5 similar cars.