60%? 80%? Ignore R & D.
60 to 80% seems well above what’s plausible - why would the rest of the car be so cheap compared to the engine?
My only info comes from a guy who used to work for Ford. About 10 years ago he told me that the cost of building a V-6 engine at the Windsor, Ontario plant was around $600. This was in part due to a high level of automation, and thus low labor costs (which, for US automakers at least, are the big issue.)
I don’t really have a clue what’s plausible.
Here’s a report that points out that the price sticker on a car is much more then the pure cost of manufacturing - http://msl1.mit.edu/classes/esd123/vyas.pdf
Does your definition of engine include the emissions systems? Computer? Cooling system? Fuel delivery system?
You can typically buy a brand new engine for a passenger automobile for between $2000 and $5000 (not including engine management control, injection manifolds, or other powertrain elements). Actually production cost is probably about half or slightly more of that. Virtually all engine blocks are castings which are then machined for bores and bearings, and most production cars have cast heads that are machined for cam bushings, valve ports, et cetera.
A good portion of the cost of the car is in development (and no small part of the cost of American cars is funding union retirement funds). If you were to build a car based on an existing design and tooling with minimal development Hindustan Ambassador and without the wide array of modern safety features and use cheap labor or modern high production automation, you could probably keep production costs in the low thousands of dollars.
Stranger
How much do “modern safety features” add to the cost?
Air bags cost up to $1000 to replace - many cars today have up to 10 although they all don’t cost that much. Obviously, the cost to the manufacturer is much less then the cost at retail.
Yeah, but not that much more, i.e. manufacturers aren’t adding safety features because they offer the opportunity for substantial markup; they offer them in order to compete with other companies. I suspect a fair amount of the replacement cost of airbags and other replaceable units is also the labor cost–it is something that has to be done by a trained technician, both because of the potential hazard of ordnance-armed devices, and because it needs to be properly installed and inspected to assure that it will, in fact, function as intended. Rick can speak on this in with much greater experience than I can.
Another cost is the continuous research, analysis, and testing required to validate and improve such systems. This is surprisingly expensive because the company wants to be absolutely assured that a) the device functions in a manner that is safe and reliable for all potential occupants, b) it doesn’t increase liability by doing greater harm or failing to work as advertised, and c) to best Volve, Mercedes, Subaru, Saab, Lexus, et cetera by obtaining the vaunted “Best in Class” ranking by standards and oversight organizations.
It wouldn’t surprise me at all that the effort put into crashworthiness and passive and active safety systems exceeds the development and production costs of the entire powertrain by a fair margin.
Stranger
It’s really impossible to ignore the R&D and other up front costs, especially when you don’t define R&D. Do you mean just the design for the engine, or the design for the tooling that has to build the engine? It’s really all figured into the cost.
Engines are probably a surprisingly low portion of the car, as almost every manufacturer builds its own engines, where I define the engine as the “short block,” or the naked engine stripped of all bolt-ons (sure, Ford buys their PowerStroke, and other small cases). Aside from the body-in-white, the engine is one of the last few components that most companies build themselves, and for at least one Chrysler, they don’t even build that! Everything else is a purchased item, and those companies have to make a profit (for example, Canada-based Magna is raking it in!).
Engines also have the economy of scale. You can put virtually the same engine in 12 different cars, but each of those 12 different cars need different windshields, different doors, different fenders, different interior trim, etc.