PRIOR CONVICTION
Matt Prior
AUTOCAR IMAGE
There was a time when bosses at car manufacturers didn’t like to talk about platforms – the mechanical underpinnings of their cars. These are expensive to develop, so big car companies share them across brands, and bosses used to think that it might be perceived as bad news if the public knew that a cheap car was largely the same underneath as an expensive one. So they preferred to keep schtum.
The really difficult and pricey bit to develop was – and still is, most notably in cars with engines – the area between the front wheels and the driver, because largely everything substantial goes into it. There’s the engine itself, of course, plus the transmission, while behind it is the dashboard and everything that entails, including a whole heap of the electronics – more electronics than ever. Behind it is, put in very crude terms, something a car is just dragging around. So the same platform can host many different lengths of car.