Field of Inquiry

Industrial Economics

One question, followed until the numbers answered it, and the answer was no.

Joiner’s tools. Joseph Moxon, Mechanick Exercises, 1678.

Questions like this usually get argued rather than costed, which is why I wanted to cost it. Could a deliberately stripped, genuinely repairable car be built and sold profitably in Detroit, at a price that has effectively disappeared from the American market, by a new entrant structured as a cooperative?

I worked it through: the bill of materials, the tooling, the volume sensitivity, the regulatory path, the corporate structure, and post-mortems of nine American car startups that failed. By the third month the model had killed the premise, and the write-up says so. That is why it is here rather than deleted, because a well-documented no is worth more than the manifesto it replaced.

The Work

American Basic

Archived

Whether a sub-$17,000 repairable American car could be built profitably. It could not.

Manifesto, engineering specification, bill of materials, cost model, volume sensitivity, corporate structure, regulatory path, and nine failure post-mortems. Deliberately contains no code. The volume sensitivity analysis is what breaks it: the price point requires a scale that the capital structure required to reach that scale cannot service.

What existsRoughly 85,000 words across 43 documents, finished as an argument and closed. No visuals. The most interesting document is the verdict, not the proposal.