Are All New Cars IDENTICAL Underneath?

hey everyone hope you're doing okay don't adjust your screens this is how bright my jumper is um today i'm going to talk to you about the platforms that our cars are based on and ask the question are all cars basically the same first things first what is the platform and why do they matter chances are you'll have heard reviewers talking about how new car a is in fact based on old car b or car c she has a platform with cardi just to show off how smart they are and motoring journalists love to geek out by spotting the bits from one car they get repurposed on another i mean everybody knows that old ferraris used fiat air vents and the mclaren f1's rear lights are off a bus right that's true or maybe the bus has the same lights as a mclaren f1 but either way have a look at it once you see it you can't unsee it anyway apart from scoring nerd points checking with that one what does this actually tell us well if part sharing is limited to only something as small as a window switch or a rear light then no big deal but when it comes to the foundations on which the car is built then it can and should be something that informs your buying decisions but let's backtrack a little bit now and put some of this into a little bit of context because it's actually nothing new back when ford were making model t's way back when you could only buy them in black but you could have the cars with either a car body or a van body or even a truck body in the 20s and 30s if you were buying a luxury car you didn't even get a body you took it to a coach builder and they gave you the shape you wanted so you didn't buy a rolls royce or a bentley you bought a rolls royce or a bentley bodied by mulliner or park ward or whoever so i could have had my rolls-royce rory with my own bodywork that could have been pretty sweet or awful fast forward to the 50s and 60s and although the technology had moved on a lot you could still get your ferraris your aston martins or your maseratis with your choice of bodywork on it whether that be from pininfarina scallietti or zagato these days things are a little bit different it kind of happens in three main ways first of all you can get two manufacturers who love and adore each other and want to save money to agree to share development costs and then sell essentially the same car just with different badges so like the toyota gt86 and the subaru brz or the toyota corolla estates and the new suzuki sways same cars another way they do it is when two completely different car makers buddy up to split the costs and share some bits to build to similar-ish cars that wouldn't be cost-effective to build on their own like like toyota does anyone see in a pattern here hi toyota build your own cars please just joking carry on anyway take the supra and the bmw z4 one's a coupe and another one's a roadster but they're exactly the same underneath to the point that you find yourself sitting in a toyota that actually feels more like a bmw it's even got the bmw sat nav just with different graphics completely messes with your head now examples like this are pretty rare truth be told the real story is the so-called platform engineering where manufacturers build a basic foundation that they can use across loads and loads of different cars or even across loads of different brands everyone does it but the absolute dons the master of this craft at vw and the brands that they own including audi saya skoda porsche bentley even lamborghini look at it this way building a new car costs billions you multiply that across all the models that vw makes under all its different brands and you can start to see a bit of an issue here they don't want to build 17 different cars so what if they essentially only build two or three basic cars that can then be adapted or re-bodied for all the different brands massive cost savings and they can offer a much bigger range to fill all of those weird little niches like suvs crossovers and four-door fastbacks so they have a hatchback platform known as the mqb platform which is german for something that i cannot pronounce i've tried i failed not gonna do it today and that's what goes into the vw golf the say at leon the audi a3 and the skoda octavia plus loads of mid-sized suvs and crossovers that i can't remember right now then they have an suv platform that goes into the audi q7 and q8 the lamborghini urus the porsche cayenne the bentley bentayga and that means the same suspension bits the same engines the same brakes the same electronic control systems the same safety tech vw or whichever brand is doing the development only needs to create one set of each and then all these different cars can all use them if you raise up a bentley bentayga to its off-road ride height you can actually see the audi stampings on the suspension bits is that obvious does this mean that you're being ripped off and that all cars are basically the same though i've thought about this and i don't think so see by spreading the costs it means that engineering is the same quality whether it's in a skoda or an audi the dressing on the top like how it looks and how squishy the plastic surfaces are in the cabin the way it drives all of those things can be tuned by the brands in a million different ways to suit their particular customers a lambo eures still has a nicer cabin than a q8 plus it's all really flexible mqb isn't even a platform it's an engineering philosophy they can make it longer or taller or wider to suit whatever car it's actually going to go into and it also means that vw can use the same production line the same processes in all their factories because they're all using the same parts it's not perfect though you see by putting all your eggs in one basket the platform becomes more important than the product let me explain when you invest really heavily in building a platform that's meant to last for decades if something big happens you can't make big changes quickly and the problem is something big is happening electrification here's an example for a while now mercedes have been teasing us with its compact electric car the eqa years of press releases snazzy sketches endless tech presentations massive hype and finally they release the car and it's it's an electric gla that's all it is it's got a blacked out grille but it's a gla with batteries that just goes to show even mercedes can't afford to ditch all that investment it's made in the platform under the a-class b-class gla glb and all the rest so rather than start again with a dedicated ev foundation it's had to adapt the one that's made for its ice models meaning it gets none of the benefits you'd have from designing a car around batteries and motors rather than an engine and fuel tank it drives fine don't get me wrong but there are compromises like the fact it weighs over two tons and the range isn't great and the boot is about two-thirds the size of the boot in the gla you can check out my review somewhere here in the uh top right hand corner it's the same with the other german manufacturers as well audi and bmw are both making noise about their bold new electric models but most of them are just adapted versions of existing ice carts like the eqa shout out to jaguar though they're doing it properly with the ipace which shows what you can come up with when you have a fresh design maybe not so cost efficient maybe not the most efficient full stop actually but it looks cool and it drives brilliantly back to vw now because of its size it has been able to develop a new platform for its next generation of electric cars it's called the meb and you're going to be hearing that term quite a lot it's the one they use for the new id3 they could have just put some batteries in a golf and called it a day but the new platform gives us way more space inside more range and a lot more other benefits than if they were to just use the golf shell so the platform is going to be used in a bunch of new cars like the skoda eniac the seya elborn the audi q4 e-tron and probably many many more oh and this is a different platform on another level but the fancy new audi e-tron gt they just announced looks a little bit like a porsche thaican don't you think and there's a reason for that basically the same cars but hey look if i'm getting porsche engineering for audi money then i'm in suffice to say things are gonna get even more geeky but i'm here for you guys and if you do hear me going on about platforms or whatever in the near future it's basically to help you guys choose the right car and not i promise you to impress you with my amazing knowledge honest anyway i hope you guys enjoyed the video if you learned something new then make sure you hit the like button leave me a comment down below if you have any questions or want to share your amazing opinions and as always don't forget to like and subscribe catch you on the next one so you

Channel: AutoTrader

Views: 77,980

Rating: 4.9623761 out of 5

Keywords: car platform, mqb, meb, vw platform, urus, bentayga, q7, audi, vw, lamborghini, best new car, best car, id3, id4, ferrari, Rory reid, autotrader

Id: oxWUKG_ANcs

Length: 9min 11sec (551 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 23 2021