Inanely simple steps saved car plants over $1 million, 15 million kWh

Now, will that savings be passed on to the consumer? Or will it go towards margins?

 

I don't think that's a sensible question, really... they're not in a cost-plus environment. I mean, do you ask whether Walmart will take their savings from [insert thing here] or pass it on to customers? What's a million dollars divided over the number of cars they sell in a year? It's under a dollar. How would you even pass that along? Drop 75¢ off the destination charge?

Companies are complex, they do good things and bad things, smart things and dumb things. Most people are that way, companies are thousands of people...

 

This discussion reminds me of a controversy several years ago in the town in RI where I was a firefighter. The current mayor was grandstanding and wanted to prevent the firefighters from using the trucks to get food, even if they were already out returning from a call, or training, or less than a mile from the station, still available and in their district. He got the townspeople really worked up over the expense of the fuel used for this.
So I did a calculation, assuming 3 mpg fuel economy, and assuming one trip per day per truck, 3 miles round trip. The cost of getting food, assuming they made a special trip out for it, was....wait for it.... 10 cents per resident PER YEAR.

I pointed it out in an online discussion, someone said, "I don't care, it's still an abuse of our tax dollars."
There will always be that someone.
One dime per year. I WANT IT BACK.

 

It’s an understandable backlash against the corporate excuses of needing to charge the consumer for an inexhaustible list of reasons while not proving a cheaper alternative. It’s not that the costs aren’t truly rising, just that it shouldn’t be a surprise for consumers to demand a similar method for lowering prices.

 

I view @npaladin2000 ’s question more broadly.

A growing number of customers, myself included, keep protesting that Stellantis keeps squeezing more and more money out of customers, either by raising prices, denying warranty coverage, delaying repairs, compromising quality, etc.

At the same time Stellantis loves to brag about high margins.

Stellantis is now telling us that they saved $1M by switching off the lights. That is great.

So, is this A SIGN that Stellantis is committed to price containment, to delivering more consistent quality, better customer service and greater value to customers? Or, as usual, their concern remains the interests of investors and themselves?

If the latter, as laudable as the savings might be, I wouldn’t care about them one iota.

 

I view @npaladin2000 ’s question more broadly.
...
So, is this A SIGN that Stellantis is committed to price containment, to delivering more consistent quality, better customer service and greater value to customers? Or, as usual, their concern remains the interests of investors and themselves?

No, I don't think it's a sign. I think it's just a savings of many millions of kilowatt-hours of power by something that should be obvious to everyone. Shutting stuff off, using thermostats, turning down the heat... it's sad that Americans have generally decided none of this matters as a general rule.

 

These implementations are straight out of the late 1990s. Manufacturing made the switch to LEDs and plant lights on motion sensors so they would turn off if a section of the plant was not used.

Machinery shutting down after X minutes of being on standby is straight from 1980s laptops. We were programming machines to do this back then.

So much for FCA's plant modernization. But then again, FCA's toolkit was mostly from the 1970s.

 

Maybe they can use the savings to put better gaskets on the 3rd brake light of the Rams that are still leaking water after years of the same problem. Between the brake light and the rear window frame cracking and causing major water leaks on the DT, some guys have had had 4 different windows installed, all supposedly different designs. Page after page about this on the 5th gen Ram forums.

 

The price of the product is not a direct correlation to the cost of the product. If a percent of the population has a certain amount of money to spend on a car, they will do it.
that 50 thousand dollar jeep could cost 10 thousand dollars to make. But if they sold it at that price, the person that has 50 thousand to spend would choose maybe a 50k Mercedes.
sure, the jeep will attract 10k customers, but that 50k customer got away

 

It's true of many industries. Economists are rediscovering psychology from the 1960s and sociology from the 1900s. Educators are rediscovering psychology from the 1950s and management fads from the 1990s... designers do try to get ideas from everyplace they can, admittedly. I don't know how insular engineers are, but I do find it interesting that Tesla really pushed the boundaries of moving from hardware to software. (I won't give credit to their current showman but to the people who were there before him.)

 

And sometimes it's just plain old fashioned common sense, which actually is not common at all!