Sometimes, Differences Are Only Skin Deep

Volkswagen’s cute New Beetle and Audi’s edgy TT two-seat sport coupe don’t seem to have much in common. And Buick’s white-bread Regal would never get a second look from fans of Chevrolet’s NASCAR-flavored Monte Carlo SS.

But each pair are automotive “twins,” joined not just by a marketing slogan or corporate heritage but by the automotive DNA of engineering and shared parts. Twins are not uncommon.

When Daryl Nishioka’s beloved Acura Legend was stolen, the Huntington Beach man seriously thought of replacing it with a Honda Accord EX, twin to the more expensive 2002 Acura TL. He is such a fan of Honda’s cars that his friends joke that Nishioka’s red blood cells are H-shaped like the car maker’s logo.

But he ended up going with the Acura for $30,500, or about $8,000 more than the Accord. “You get the snob appeal of an Acura, and it’s a little quieter than the Accord and handles better,” he said. “I got more car.”

Those two cars were spun, though, from the same basic engineering. Known as platform sharing, it is a common tactic today as auto makers strive to keep a lid on development and production costs.

Savvy consumers can benefit by knowing which vehicles are twins--and which parts are shared. A buyer who wants but cannot afford the luxurious Audi A6 can get most of the same engineering and power train in its Volkswagen Passat V-6 twin.

The practice is straight out of a 70-year-old General Motors Corp. play book, said John Wolkonowicz of the Bulin Group, a Northville, Mich., consulting company that helps auto makers zero in on what consumers will want.

“General Motors in the ‘30s invented the whole concept,” and others copied, he said.

For many of the Route 66 generation, going from a Chevrolet to a Pontiac--or Oldsmobile or Buick--was a rite of passage culminating in the ultimate symbol of success: a cushy Cadillac.

GM’s four-wheeled steppingstones were often built on common platforms because, after all, “the future of the corporation and its earning power, we asserted, depended upon its ability to design and produce cars of maximum utility ... at minimum cost,” former GM Chief Executive Alfred P. Sloan wrote in his autobiography. Sloan, one of the architects of platform sharing, died in 1966.

One result of his innovative thinking is the proliferation of makes and models available to consumers today, said Jim Hossack, a consultant with Tustin-based AutoPacific Inc., a global automotive market research firm.

Development costs used to dictate that no car could be successful in the U.S. market unless the auto maker could sell hundreds of thousands without having to make more than minimal changes from model year to model year.

Today, car makers routinely produce limited-run niche models from shared platform programs--Ford’s resurrected Thunderbird roadster, for example, from the platform developed for the Lincoln LS and Jaguar S-Type sedans--and count them successful, and profitable, if just 25,000 to 50,000 are sold.

The Japanese, especially, took careful notes.

Their astounding success in the auto market is built largely on the economies of using twins to spread development, engineering and manufacturing and parts costs across the broadest spectrum possible.

It all starts with the platform, which used to be a physical thing--the steel underbody of a car or truck--but more and more is defined as a set of engineering specifications that determine the optimum locations for a vehicle’s basic pieces to ensure the best handling, ride, balance, safety and ease of production.

“The auto industry isn’t in agreement about how to define a platform anymore,” said Mike Michels, spokesman for Torrance-based Toyota Motor Sales USA Inc., a company that has based a large and growing lineup of cars and trucks on relatively few platforms.

“We talk about platforms at Toyota in terms of the percentage of shared components. So it is not literally the steel underbody stamping but the aggregate of common parts that different vehicles might share.”

Chrysler spokesman Jan Zverina said his company’s engineers and designers stick to the original idea. “The platform can be considered to be the underbody structure of a vehicle,” he said.

Platforms now are modular; they can be stretched or shortened, widened or narrowed to fit different designs. The advent of the so-called crossover or car-based sport utility vehicle, such as the Lexus RX300 from Toyota’s luxury division, means that completely different kinds of vehicles can share a platform.

At Nissan, for example, the new 350Z sports car rides on a platform shared with the Infiniti G35 sedan and the forthcoming G35 coupe, M45 sedan and FX45 sport wagon.

Toyota’s Camry also provides the underpinnings of the Lexus RX300 SUV and ES300 sedan and the Toyota Sienna minivan, Avalon sedan and Highlander SUV.

“You want to have fewer platforms. It takes hundreds of millions to develop a car line,” said Gordon Wangers, president of AMCI, a Vista, Calif.-based auto product planning group.

If an auto maker can spread that amount among four different vehicles, the savings can be tremendous. It hasn’t made cars cheaper than they were a few decades ago, but it has helped keep costs from escalating more, said AutoPacific’s Hossack.

Platforms can be shared even by seeming competitors.

Toyota’s Corolla-based Matrix, a sporty wagon, is a twin of the Pontiac Vibe, which shares everything except its exterior sheet metal with the Matrix and is built in a Northern California auto plant, New United Motor Manufacturing Inc., jointly owned by Toyota and GM. And Volvo’s 40-series cars and station wagons and Chrysler’s Sebring coupe all share platforms with the sporty Mitsubishi Eclipse, thanks to a series of development deals.

The number of shared components can vary wildly. In fact, though “twins” is the commonly used term to describe shared-platform vehicles, some are best described as “cousins.”

Honda’s perennial best-selling family sedan, for example, provides the basic DNA of a hot-selling entry-level car from its Acura luxury division. Twins, yes, but they share relatively little.

Acura takes the Honda Accord’s basic underpinnings, replaces a vast array of pieces, including engine, transmission, body panels, suspension, dashboard trim and mirrors, adds high-intensity discharge headlights, a sporty shifter, a premium sound system and heated mirrors and seats and out pops the Acura 3.2 TL.

Knowing what is shared--and what isn’t--can help consumers make smart decisions. Just as a bargain-hunting buyer can skip the Audi in favor of the Volkswagen Passat, someone looking to upgrade might find that the wiser decision is to move to a luxury brand rather than to pile costly options onto a more plebian model that may have less resale value, as Nishioka did when he passed up a Honda for a new Acura.

That twins can differ in such basic characteristics as performance, ride quality and roominess is no accident.

As buyers get more and more demanding about what they want--and don’t want--car makers design each model for a very particular niche. And car makers with several brands strive to keep the characteristics of each unique.

So although the Dodge Stratus and Chrysler Sebring coupes share a platform with the Mitsubishi Eclipse, the Japanese sport coupe gets a modified rear suspension and its engine cradle is lowered to provide a sleeker profile, said Dan Sims, design director at Cypress-based Mitsubishi Research and Design America.

The platform also is shared by Mitsubishi’s Galant sedan, and all four vehicles are built at the same Mitsubishi plant in Illinois.

But Chrysler designed the exteriors and interiors of the Sebring and Stratus, and they are larger than the Eclipse.

What the cars share are the PLPs, or principal locating points, that dictate where the front and rear suspensions, engine and even the base of the windshield attach when the vehicles are moving down the assembly line.

It makes it easier, and less costly, to shift from vehicle to vehicle on the line, and it often allows a plant to use the same automated machines and metal stamping tooling for different vehicles.

Chrysler officials estimate that the Mitsubishi and Chrysler Group vehicles that use the ST platform share about two-thirds of their parts, mainly items such as brakes, steering units, suspensions and electrical components that the owners never see.

“That’s all,” Zverina said. “The stuff that doesn’t make the difference to consumers. They want a bulletproof engine, window lifts that work. But the other 33% is critically important. The key is brand distinction--everything the consumer sees, feels or touches,” he said.

“You can completely change the characteristics of the vehicle to fit a Dodge performance brand image versus a Chrysler luxury image. Then, if you do the same with the Mitsubishi, you can wind up with three distinct flavors of a vehicle, which really increases your manufacturing efficiency,” Zverina said. “And by reducing manufacturing complexity, platform sharing increases quality.”

As a result of Chrysler’s takeover by Germany’s Daimler-Benz to form DaimlerChrysler, the future will see platform sharing not only with Mitsubishi but also with DaimlerChrysler’s luxury brand, Mercedes-Benz, Zverina said.

Chrysler’s Crossfire coupe, scheduled to begin production early next year, will have a Mercedes engine and drive train, while the Chrysler Pacifica sport wagon, also due in the first half of 2003, will have a rear suspension based on that developed for the Mercedes-Benz E Class.

DaimlerChrysler also is planning to build a transmission plant in Indiana to produce five-speed automatics designed by Mercedes-Benz. By sharing the transmission among other DaimlerChrysler brands “and not having to reinvent the wheel, we estimate the savings in research and development alone will be between $80 million and $100 million,” Zverina said.

“You can take the [component-sharing] concept all over the map. Say you’re looking at a seat stitching machine. You look in Stuttgart, you look throughout Mitsubishi’s operations and you look here, within Chrysler’s system. You figure out who has the best machine and the best practice. You order three of those machines ... you get economies of scale.”

*

Times staff writer John O’Dell contributed to this report.

*

Freelance writer Jeff Yip writes about automobile technology. He can be reached at jeff@cyber speed.com. John O’Dell covers the auto industry for The Times’ Business Section and Highway 1. He can be reached at john.odell@latimes.com.