Very interesting stickers Jack!

there is something similar in my S60. Don't remember though if i read it somewhere, or if the dealer told me. ANyway, engine, tranny, chassis and some other important parts are made in Sweden, Gothenburg. Assemby Point (some town - can't remember name) Belgium. Then shipped to Pireus and then by truck, brought here.

- ONLY REGISTERED AND ACTIVATED USERS CAN SEE ALL LINKS - CLICK HERE TO REGISTER is a link to a Cayman S sticker that was posted on another thread. The image is cropped so that some of the details are left out, but could it be that there's only 60 % German parts on a Cayman?

Then please explain to me why:
1. Skoda (VW platform) made in the Chech Republic is more reliable than VW, MB, BMW, Porsche, Audi made in Germany?!

2. is it that a VW plant in Germany is a waste of money, while a chech one is the most profitable ?!

3. a easten european worker works 2000 hours a year, while a western one 1440 hours ?!

1. The Skoda is nearly 100% german engineering. Reliability is only one small aspect of quality , VW gives most Skodas not the newest developements and the cars are much less complex. A russian Lada is also a reliable car - but it's extreme low quality. Therefore, it is difficult to compare a S-Class with a Octavia - the S-class has technology (the new one alone has 944 patents!) that the Skoda will get in 5 or 10 years and it has about 2 or 3 times as much technology. The second point is the way to determine reliability - every study or test has big failures.

2. The people who tell you that a german plant is a "vaste of money" are the same people that get more money into their own pocket when they outsource production (making money for a short period of time). Do you think that they develop the new Golf and one year later they had to pay 500€ (or what did they say?) extra to sell a car? They can just put all marketing costs or machines to the 2005 production of the Golf to calculate the profit for every car and you have the right numbers to tell the press why do you want to go to Bratislava (500€/month) - while Porsche, Audi and BMW are the most effective car companys in the world (even VW is making over one billion € profit)!?
Do you know how big is the part of the workers wages in a car production? 10%!!! And they tell you that they can save 500€ per 20t€-Golf just with cheaper wages?
You don't believe those numbers, don't you?

3. But the western worker works more efficiently and more productive - you can force every donkey to work 20h a day - but is that really the point?


@NevadaJack
Thanks! More labels? Most Boxster for the US-Market are made in Finland - maybe because of that just 60%?
A real challenge for my English - what a nightmare ;-)

Thanks for the stickers! That's interesting indeed. I do believe that, with the amount of lawyers around, the USA is one of the foremost consumer rights countries - if you do something wrong, someone will scream and yell and set the lawyers on to you, and then you'd be up for big bucks. So they've made the rules to protect the people, for better or worse.

The options list is also very interesting. It means that you can tell whether the options are there without guessing or asking, so that if you were in a hurry to buy a car, you could tell if a showroom floor one had your desired options, instead of going to order one in.

As for Made in Germany, I reckon it's overrated. Not a bad place to have your car built, but still overrated - it's not the be-all and end-all of car manufacturing countries.

Only one label? Come on...

Quality and the place where something gets build is a complex story. It's about the mentality, every time somebody from a complete different kind of mentality comes to build a facility in a foreign country it leads to missunderstandings between the people who build the stuff and the people who are sitting thousands of kilometres away (it they even care). So it's often the best to build the product where you're company, your developement takes place.
But very often managers don't care about those things, they just see short-term costs (how many companys are in big trouble even when they produce everything in China?) and when you see that a german or swiss or japanese product isn't build in it's home-country it's a sign for cost-cutting even on other places (in construction).
Do you know how the locks on the pillars from the new M-Class look like? They are exactly the same construction used in many other cars like BMW, Lexus, Cadillac or small MBs (A/B-Class), just a piece of bend wire. While the "real" MBs still have those plastic-covered locks with a special shape (in german it's called "Keilzapfen" a "V"-shape - it get's thicker) - that hasn't directly something to do with the place where the car is build (the locks are from a german supplier namend Kiekert) but it shows that different "quality-rules" are used and the "Made in USA" is only a clearly visible sign for this cost-reduction. I hope you know what I'm trying to tell - build something in a foreign country is often not even the direct cause for quality-issues, it's a symptom. A chinese doesn't work worse because he is chinese but because he is just used to work as cheap as possible, without expensive machines, without social systems... Basicly I think this part of globalisation is a new form of slavery: you take from people who cannot defend themselves to make rich people even more rich.
There are a few exceptions where special know-how is needed, but than the wages in this foreign production-country are not lower.

But I didn't want to start a discussion about globalisation, even when I think it's a very important thing my bad english could lead to missunderstanding.
Let's talk about cars ;-)