One piston and cylinder:
2 rod bolts
2 rod nuts
1 rod
1 cap
1 bushing small end
2 pcs rod bearing
1 wrist pin
1 piston
1 top ring
1 middle ring
3 pcs oil ring
2 wrist pin clips
1 cylinder
4 studs
4 washers
4 barrel nuts
1 gasket spacer

That's 32 parts (or pieces, depending on semantics). That barely scratches the surface. Anything assembled was assembled from parts, such as the fusebox. How many parts in a relay?

Number could be closer to 10^6. It's like the cover of the "How to fix your VW for the Complete Idiot" cover illustration.

That I buy, because they're all individual parts you could order. That's less than two hundred parts for all six. A relay is sold as one part; they are not serviceable. I'm not seeing the 100,000 parts, it's a small car - where could you hide thousands besides the drivetrain? Look at the entire front end - you got A arms, torsion bars, stab, lower arms, shocks, bushings, ball joints, rotors, pads, calipers, hoses. I'm sure I'm missing a few things, but that's about it - 50 parts? Not including fasteners, shims, washers, etc. I'd be very surprised if it was even 10,000 parts.

Uh, what model year we talkin'? And with which options?

I took a look at a timing chain last night. They have 98 links, and each link is made from a number of distinct pieces. For two chains, the total amounts to 1646 pieces!

Yes, a relay is one part, but someone (or something) had to make and assemble everything inside. I know my question is fuzzy, and the criteria for counting are vague. I guess what I'm interested in is understanding the overall level of investment in making one of these cars. Additionally, a CDI box (intended as a non-serviceable part) is one part, but it has parts within it that can and are replaced.

How many stampings in a unibody? You could think of the unibody as one part, and perhaps it has a part number, but I have replaced a piece of mine, as many of you have.

-Scott

I would look at the number of parts required to assemble the car at the factory and look at that as the total. But some things, like pistons, maybe, come from the supplier with the rings, wrist pins and circlips already installed, so is that one part or seven? And you can break down electronics to an infinite degree: is a diode one thing or a wire and a ceramic element; is a light bulb one thing or three - socket, bulb, filament? The unibody is a good example - it's a tub, one part to most Pelicans, but is made of many parts welded together. Food for thought. Grady should be done counting up the parts any day.

Now add up the cost of those parts...

I vaguely remember an article from (I think) Top Gear Magazine, they costed out building a Ford Escort (UK) from individual dealer supplied parts. The price came in about 4 times the cost of buying a complete car.

Like the Johnny Cash song about a guy who works in the car factory, and build a new car by taking home "One Piece at a Time" in his lunchbox.

There was a Doyle Dane Bernbach ad for the VW Beetle back in the '60s that hinted that a VW dealer could build a complete car from the VWoA parts system ... cost was, IIRC, around $10K for a car that was listing around $1900 at the time.

I'm a Parts Technical analyst for a different German manufacturer. The parts a car is built with are often different than the parts that would be purchased as spares.

For the most part there are two different kinds of parts:
"Construction parts" These are the parts used to build a car. They usually consist of larger assemblies and are not available for public purchase. Sometimes you see part numbers on parts that are no good at the dealer. That's usually what those numbers are.

"Spare parts" Are the parts we buy. Construction parts are broken down by the vendor and assigned these numbers for purchase.

Defcom brings a good example of the unibody.
When the car is built the Unibody is assigned one "Construction" part number. This counts as one part. This Construction part number is on the car's Bill of Materials. As a unibody there are no seperate sheetmetal pieces like quarters etc... So if you were to build a car in pieces you would be buying more parts than if it were new.

That applies to just about all the subassemblies of a car.

There are too many variables to come up with a specific number of parts.Not just the options of a specific car but deals with the vendors change things all the time making assemblies larger and smaller.

To decide how many parts are in a car would depend on how you are deciding to count them. By construction, by spare parts or a mix of the two.

Hence the need for a finite protocol of what is a part and what is a part of a part. I think the reason I find this little exercise interesting goes back to my fascination with exploded diagrams, like the Idiot's Guide example stated before. It surely doesn't matter to any of us if our 911 has 4500, 6500 or 8500 parts total as long as they are all working together at our moment of bliss when we're flying down the road thinking "I have ONE".

Imagine being a dealer responsible for maintaining an inventory or at least access to spare parts for forty years or more worth of car models.
It would be interesting to know the parts count at the average dealer and the parts count at a central warehouse that supplies the dealers.
Along with that would be the value, retail or wholesale, of the parts a dealer is expected to carry. Might be some insight into the cost and complexity of that side of the business.
I would suppose somewhere in Germany is a complex simply responsible for getting spares made and shipped all over the world.

BMW build a 2002 out of replacement parts recently. quote:

"The last 2002 was manufactured in the late 1970's but now BMW is making a new 2002tii at the BMW Museum's "Glass Workshop" in Munich. The project was inspired by the fact that Mobile Tradition, the company's heritage division, is able to provide an estimated 90 percent of all spare parts required for a BMW 2002.

An original bodyshell from the '70s was the starting point, while the small number of spare parts not available from Mobile Tradition are being taken from a donor car or remanufactured by hand."

Some of those hot rod shows have been building '69 cameros from skratch also.

i think ebay should sponsor a competition for someone to build a 911 only from parts bought off ebay.

You bet.
Mercedes Benz Global Logistics Center in Germersheim
I took this picture from an office window
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1154035493.jpg

More of that massive complex- This is all car/truck parts in here, the offices are where I'm taking the picture from

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1154035923.jpg

I would bet a Porsche dealer parts dept. doesn't break 50k a month, and they're inventory is tiny stocking little if anything more than tune-up parts,- but I'm only guessing. Whatever they need would most likely be ordered on a stock order or if needed quicker- fedex etc from their Parts Distribution center here in the U.S. or in Germany if it's not stocked domestically.

A more mainstream dealer of an average size could stock a million dollars of inventory but it depends on the size of the dealer as it varies greatly. Ditto with the parts distribution centers.

Mercedes has a main hub in South Jersey stocking I believe half a billion dollars and 4 smaller parts distribution centers stocking a fraction of that.