Intake manifold construction, intercoolers

[Bernd Felsche]

Bruce tapped away at the keyboard with:

> >From: "Bernd Felsche" <bernie at innovative.iinet.net.au
> 
> Various bits of snippage.
> 
> > EFI is appealing in mass market because it is CHEAP to build,
> > install and maintain (over the nominal life of the car).

> Ya, them $450 idle speed controllers are a real money saver.  What
> did you say earlier one every 2 years until you figured out how to
> clean it.

It's $450 (Australian), so not as costly as you think. It's an
inflated price anyway for Oz; at least double the dealer cost of the
part in Germany. I only ever paid for the one.

What does an emission-compliant carb cost, that delivers a better
fuel consumption, driveability and performance from cold start, to
hot start, to hot run (let alone emisssions) and never requires
adjustment? 

BTW: I get about 700km on 55 litres.

> > > Not to mention that competent engineer/tuners are quite
> > > capable of making Weber DCOE/IDA carbys perform at least as
> > > well as EFI !
> 
> > Under all nominal operating conditions? On all sorts of cars?
> > At a price the customer can afford? I very much doubt that.
> 
> If a car can have DCOE(s) put on it, I'll bet I can tune it to the
> same degree of customer satisfaction as any oem EFI.

> I'd venture a guess, that item by item I could do a DCOE conversion
> within the funding of retail replacement prices for an entire EFI.

Let's forget about _retail_prices_ because they are artificially
inflated. There are huge total margins from manufacturer to retail.
The idle stabiliser probably costs VDO less than $20 to make.  I
doubt very much that VW would have paid even double that, seeing
that they would have ordered the units in the hundreds of thousands
every few months.

The opportunity for large margins in the after-market is not nearly
so great. I'm not talking about fuzzy dice here. Productions runs
are small so the initial cost is high. If you're pricing for the
enthusiast market (i.e. not the pro-competition), then your retail
price has to be somewhere near that of OEM. You can't therefore get
a 500% markup from the part manufacturer to the wholesaler.

Further down the food-chain, margins are susceptible to local market
conditions; competition and market size. e.g. I could airfreight
distributors from California, pay duties and taxes, and still make
100% on the items for retail to underprice the locally-sourced
suppliers - who are only making 20% if they're lucky.

There are economies of scale. For the "original parts" market, they
can set their prices how they feel; based on what the market will
bear. There's little correlation between cost and prices.

Volkswagen would have paid much less than $1000 (US) for the entire
injection system on my car. The "$1000" ECU has a PCB with $100
worth of parts (at retail component prices). A quick addition of
retail prices on the EFI components adds up to in excess of $5000.
A long block replacement lists at $13,000 (plus 10% tax) without EFI
and ancillaries.

I bought the whole car, new, for $27,000, including taxes at the
then-higher rate.

Retail prices for original replacement parts have almost no
correlation with actual costs. They are numbers that have fallen out
of a random profit generator driven by accountants.

> Doubt it all you want, but just happens to be true.

> Have you ever really *tuned* a DCOE?.

No. I don't have a clue about DCOE in particular.
Oh, there's a bar of soap. Does it look anything like that?

Solex, Mikuni and other Weber; yeah I've seen them and tweaked
Solexes in my earlier VW. I won't flatter myself and call it
"tuning" as it was only returning the components back to spec., but
the result was a little better than before the exercise.
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