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Originally Posted by mikefocke
Why did Porsche develop a mass market engine in addition to the older high end design they still use on some cars?
Because they had to achieve a profit or go out of business. Volume and low manufacturing cost lead to profit. Long production runs with the same basic design allow development costs to be amortized over many more units. Same reason the '97 Boxster used the 996's front endparts.
You can hand build a limited number of engines in cars that sell for $100k but not for one that you sell in volume for as low as $40k or even one that sells for $70k.
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Nobody said they had to be hand built. I hate to use LS engines as an example again, but look at the entry level versions of that engine. All mass produced using machines and relatively cheap parts. Then there's the higher-end version like the LS7's and LS9's that are hand built with more expensive parts and more performance.
I can't imagine it was a cheap process to design, test, redesign, tool, and manufacture a completely new engine... especially when you consider the cost of revisions (although I'm sure they didn't anticipate the enormous failures of the early motors). I understand parts bin construction, and actually, I think that theory would prove what I'm saying. How would it be more cost effective to have two different engines to manufacture and two different engine assembly systems?
Not only that, but good luck selling a "high-end" German sports car with the mentality of "Well we pinched as many pennies as we could to give you the least expensive thing that we thought we could get away with and still turn a profit". Obviously that's not their marketing strategy, but this seems to be the reasoning a lot of people use to explain things like the M96.