Quote:
Originally Posted by mcurcio1989
Hard to imagine how a thread about winter tires is now talking about the discovery of north america and explorations to the moon in relation to German vs. American engineering might. . .but i like it.
Personally I think the whole german vs American thing is pretty clear. Being an American mechanical engineer, I have noticed that there are different kinds of engineers. You got the business minded, practical hands on guys, and the book smart ones. Germans are incredibly book smart (and perfectionists) almost to a fault and they seem to lack a lot of the practical and business sense. Americans are decent inventors but we are great at producing and marketing. Someone mentioned Henry Ford. Henry ford was an incredibly smart guy but he didn't do anything ground breaking in terms of engineering he just took the automobile (which was totally a german invention) and found ways to build them for the masses. Germans have invented a ridiculous amount of things but generally there not good at making these things well rounded or marketable. Their just great at making / innovating precise perfectly functioning things. Random example - every major advancement in boat drive design in the past 100 years has come from volvo (German) yet mercury is still quite dominant and just uses volvo's designs.
Personally I think it is to bad that Americans do not know more about Germany. We learn a decent bit about Roman and english history but nothing about Germanic. Our language was derived from Germanic and anglo saxons were Germanic and it was Germans that brought down the Roman Empire (albeit slowly). Hitler was off his rocker but it is pretty hard to argue that as a whole there is a pretty solid gene pool sloshing around over there.
|
Good discussion, but it belongs in the lounge not in the E53 forum.
From the perspective of a Canadian mechanical engineer who has worked with automakers on product development (as a Tier 1 supplier) I disagree re Henry Ford. He did do ground breaking work, but it was as much on cost engineering and manufacturing engineering as it was on vehicle design engineering. I wouldn't underestimate the impact, however.
I think that generally the Germans have been very strong on marketing their engineered products. Think of the global brand awareness, that is a specific measure of their marketing success. In a list of 2012 global brand rankings, Mercedes was #12, BMW was #13, and VW was #39. Only Toyota had a stronger global automotive brand (#11). Top America automaker was Ford, at #45. The rest of the top 100 included Honda, Toyota, Nissan, Kia, Hyundai, Audi, and Ferrari. No other US automakers other than Ford.
I've never been to Volvo in Germany. I have been to their global head office in Sweden several times though. Germany contributed quite a bit of technology with the ZF azimuth thrusters, and that brings us back to vehicle transmissions at least, with a BMW parallel.