My microwave door doesn’t fit. I don’t mean it’s falling off and preventing my rewarming of yesterday’s leftovers—I just mean it’s three or four millimeters down on the left. It doesn’t sit properly in the kitchen cabinet it’s built into. The main oven, directly below, isn’t actually directly below. It’s a couple of millimeters to the right. And the fridge door is a little wonky relative to the drawers next to it. I can’t help noticing every single morning as I get the milk. It’ll be like that in your kitchen, too.
But don’t worry: You’re the only one in your household who cares, at least unless you share your life with someone else who’s spent too much time, as you have and as I have, idly examining the fit and finish of cars. What other sphere of activity manufactures with anything like the precision and consistency of the automotive industry? (And no, don’t hit me with microelectronics. The way light leaks around the tiles of my MacBook’s backlit keyboard tells me no one from Apple ever saw how precisely illuminated even a Fiat Panda’s climate controls are.)
The trouble with ‘handcrafted’ objects is the parts don’t consistently fit. Someone makes one part, then makes the next part to fit the first one. There’s no interchangeability with parts from another supposedly identical object, it takes too much time, and as complexity increases, tolerances mount up. My kitchen, made by carpenters rather than a car factory, is the perfect example. So, actually, is the entire fabric of pretty much every house. Why don’t we get carmakers to advise on homebuilding? That’d surely improve the shortage, the cost, and the quality.
OTHER STORIES YOU MIGHT HAVE MISSED:
There’s a certain elegance to the Ferrari Roma Spider that feels unmatched
Mercedes-Benz used an X-ray in a crash test...for science
Henry Ford gets the credit for inventing mass production using interchangeable parts. But there are earlier examples. The Royal Navy needed 100,000 pulley blocks a year for its sailing ships, and they had to be jam-proof and repairable. So in the 19th century, it set up a block mill at the Portsmouth Dockyard. It used accurate lathes, standard screw sizes, and novel assembly machinery.
The car companies have elevated this to such a high art that now we take perverse delight in finding the tiniest imperfection. Think how hard it must be to press two large steel panels and produce a plastic molding (rear wing, tail panel, rear bumper) so that at their extremities, they mate and form a three-dimensional aperture so precise that another complex plastic molding, the rear light cluster, can fit into it with a borderline that’s accurate to a few tenths of a millimeter. Or consider the feat of making multiple switches, probably coming from different suppliers, that all have exactly the same surface gloss, illumination, and click-spring action.
But does it make us happy? Look at the bumper gaps and the dash fit on an E30 BMW M3. Gaping. But we still want one. And if something got knocked on an ’80s or ’90s car, you might be able to biff it back, near enough that it wouldn’t matter. These days, it costs so much to realign a bumper. Plus, every time you walk into the kitchen, the sight of the oven door sets your teeth on edge.
NOTE: This article first appeared on TopGear.com. Minor edits have been made.
