A modern F1 car is probably in tbe race for most highlyt engineered object.
Voyager 1 was my immediate thought as well - it’s the furthest object ever launched by mankind that is STILL talking to us…amazing…
no, a Formula 1 car is nothing more than a toy for wealthy people.
Part of the question is to define “engineered”. Engineering, if you take the idea across all the various domains that engineers work in, and try to distil the “engineeringness” out of them really come down to the application of domain skills, process, and knowledge, to make something that meets its specification.
Until the major problems that came to light at Takata, I would have nominated car airbags as one of the more highly engineered objects we see in daily life. Hundreds of millions of people drive every day with an explosive device right in front of their face. They depend upon this device to save them in the event of a crash, and depend upon it not to blow up in their face any other time. And there a probably of the order of a billion of them in the world. That requires serious engineering.
The precision spheres for the Gravity Probe B experiment and kilogram mass standard must rate some sort of honourable mention.
I would call it the most highly engineered single mechanism device. (A tire has multiple components, of course, but as a finished product it is installed and used as one component with no service other than inflation.) When I did some research a few years ago for a book that never got written, I found estimates of total engineering development hours in the tens of thousands of person-years of effort that have contributed to the materials and structure that go into the modern automotive radial tire. I can’t think of a single tool or other “simple” device which even approaches that.
It depends on what the criteria for “most highly engineered device”; given innovations in engineering design and analysis tools I don’t think merely citing labor hours or costs is really an adequate metric; both the Manhattan Project fission device and the “Super” (hydrogen bomb) took a lot of person-hours of effort but much of that was performing laborious calculations that could now be done in seconds with more precision and fidelity with a desktop computer. With the right technical knowledge one could produce the basic layout for a novel nuclear device within a few months or less, although building the systems to refine and enrich weapons grade material is more challenging. In terms of innovation and refinement, the most highly engineered finished product the average person comes into contact with on a daily basis is either the automobile or the smartphone. In military and defense projects it probably falls somewhere between the Peacekeeper Advanced Inertial Reference Sphere (AIRS) guidance system or the Keyhole digital imaging (KH-11 and -12) surveillance satellites.
For humanity overall, I’d suggest the Large Hadron Collider particularly if you include all of the experiments associated with it. The National Ignition Facility is probably a good runner up, as will be the ITER fusion power project if and when it actually becomes operational. The International Space Station is an impressive effort of construction but while many of the systems are innovative in their own way but given the amount of difficulties it has and continues to have I’d be hard pressed to call it “well-engineered”.
My vote for most highly engineered self-mobile device would be the Mars Science Laboratory, which is a phenomenal work of taking a large lab worth of equipment and jamming into a package the size of a refrigerator, then designing it to roll across the abrasive regolith of an almost airless planet with remote and delayed instruction. As for the comment about the Voyager probes being “overengineered” for surviving so long, when it comes to space probes and devices the phrase “too much is never enough”, particularly given the rare opportunity for NASA to launch interplanetary missions of such scope; both Voyagers survived a dive trip through Jupiter’s intense radiation belts, obtained never before seen images of Saturn, and Voyager 2 to Uranus and Neptune, delivering some of the most fantastic data for planetary science imaginable. That the probes are still operating and still providing useful scientific data about the Sun’s magnetic field and the heliopause boundary speaks to the enormous value we received from this mission, and from launching two simultaneous redundant probes, an indulgence which we’ve never seen again other than the Mars Rovers (Spirit and Opportunity).
Stranger
That does not stop it from being an extremely highly engineered piece of equipment.
An F1 car would have to rank. The level of engineering that does go into into one is extraordinary.
This is a superb distillation.
Which moves the onus onto the specification. Simple specs (e.g. a homemade dog house about this [waves arms] big.) are trivial to meet and require only the most rudimentary of engineering. It does require some engineering; you can still build a doghouse that doesn’t work at all or that collapses or falls apart. We’ve all seen this cartoon of several ways to fail to successfully engineer a simple tree swing. https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/cf/0f/c2/cf0fc2657ea9b77bef891eda8b087807.jpg
The more extreme the specs the more engineering required to meet any of them, much less all of them.
Extremity can be size (a gigantic bridge or an almost quantum-scale transistor), environment (deep in the ocean, inside a living body, out in space, high or low temperatures), physical strength, bleeding edgeness of tech, reliability, production efficiency, cost. Et cetera for many more parameters.
The hardest tradeoffs are the antithetical X/Y ratios. e.g. It needs to be strong and light: strength/weight needs to be a large number. It needs to be reliable *and *cheap: lifespan/cost must be large (or cost/day of life must be small).
These antithetical ratios, of which there are many, lead to the classic trilemma saying: “Cheaper, faster, better. Pick two.”
A real project doesn’t have a mere trilemma; it has an icosalemma at each of thousands of interlocking junctures. A kilo-icosalemma. And each decision feeds into the connections to all the others. So soon you arrive at the kilo[sup]2[/sup]-icosalemma AKA the dreaded megicosalemma.
Thanks for the reply! 
I believe the amount of research that went into tires is comparable to the composite fan blades on turbine engines, that can bend while spinning at high speeds when being hit by birds.
The composite cryogenic (liquid H2) storage tanks developed by NASA come close too.
Weren’t there a few votes for the modern microprocessor?
If it’s not the most highly engineered (“from scratch”)–for which I’ll also vote for the first A-Bomb–it certainly is the most complicated.
Yep. Add another one from me.
Building something big is a lot easier than building something tiny with 4,800,000,000 transistors.
Got a problem with your jet, turbine, whatever? Swap out a part. Got a problem with a microprocessor? It’s garbage. (Sure you can turn off a faulty core now, but it’s not a good sign for the CPU overall. Toss it.)
Fab plants are some of the most expensive constructions on the planet. One in Taiwan cost $9.3 billion. And that’s just the place that makes them.
Getting huge amounts of power out of a tiny engine is not that difficult with a turbo. You just turn the boost way up and make the turbo plumbing and gearbox stronger to compensate. You could get 1300 horsepower out of a fairly standard 2 litre engine from any family car with a big enough turbo, so long as you aren’t too worried about how long it will last.
Today’s F1 cars, which get around a track 15 seconds quicker than the 1987 turbo McLaren-Honda yet use a quarter of the fuel are much more impressive.
I don’t think F1 cars really fit this question, though. They are engineered to an artificial set of limitations (X engine size, Y maximum fuel load, Z weight and so on) rather than to be as fast as a car possibly can be around a track.
If Mercedes (or whoever) decided to build a car that didn’t meet F1 regs just to see how quickly it could lap, that might fit. But it would be a vanity project so it would probably be built on a shoestring budget.
I don’t see how that matters. Engineering is about finding the optimal solution to satisfy conflicting constraints and goals. Some of those constraints are often very artificial. E.g. space probes are generally designed to fit on a specific launch vehicle.
That’s not an artificial constraint, though. The launch vehicle itself is constrained by the laws of physics and so forth. Nobody at NASA is specifically demanding that satellite designers artificially hamstring themselves for funsies (for safety and economic reasons, perhaps). The rule about how wide an F1 car can be doesn’t have anything to do with fitting it in a transporter; it’s just an arbitrary number chosen by FOCA and the FIA.
I would argue that the more constraints the engineers face, the more “highly engineers” it must be. It doesn’t matter how “artificial” the constraints are. For example, street-legal mopeds in many countries/states must have <50cc engines, meet emission standards, etc. It takes far more engineering to design it than a one-off racing bike with no rules on engine size or emissions.
yeah, if we’re going to measure e-peens on which is more “highly engineered,” I’d say a pedestrian Honda Fit is head and shoulders above a Formula 1 car. an F1 car is designed to go around a racetrack for a couple hundred miles, and are allowed to use up to four engines in a season.
meanwhile, a Honda Fit will easily last 10-15 years and 200,000 miles on pretty much minimal maintenance.
And yet, the engineering techniques developed for Formula 1 are used years later in road cars to enable them to work so well.
Formula 1 has had little relevance to road cars for a while now. in fact with the introduction of KERS the direction of technology transfer has gone from road cars to F1.
WEC and IMSA endurance racing have far, far more relevance to street cars than F1.
True. Being an electrical engineer, I was coming in to answer that “the most highly engineered object ever” is the electric power grid. 
I do think the answer is going to be more like infrastructure than a single consumer object or special purpose machine for something like space travel or blowing things up. Plumbing, for example, has been continuously “engineered” from Ancient Rome up until today, with no end in sight. The power grid has thousands of man-centuries of engineering behind it, again with no end in sight. It is improved every day, to the extreme benefit of mankind.
The engineers who brought us clean, safe water and made our sewage flow far away from where we live have probably saved more lives than all the doctors who ever lived. Every electrical appliance you have used, from air conditioning and your computer to all those fancy beds and breathing machines in hospitals depend on a highly redundant and resilient power grid.