Quote:
Originally Posted by rvoll
Lots of misinformed stuff
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Let's address some of your misconceptions.
1. "Platform" no longer means what you think it does. It no longer means cars sharing a floorpan or even major structures, like it might have done 20 years ago. It means a standardised way of putting together the major structures, that allows vastly different vehicles to be manufactured in a similar way. I'd urge you to read
this article - "kits" as mentioned are now commonly referred to as platforms (see Wikipedia's MQB page).
The high front end that you're hung up on is not an integral part of the platform; that image will just be to show what a rolling chassis based on the platform could look like. Here's the chassis from the Audi TT, compared to the VW Passat B8, both MQB based. The bulkhead/firewall/scuttle (whatever you call it) and forward lower chassis arms are the same, but that's where the similarities end.
2. We can be almost 100% certain that Subaru's platform will be scalable, because that's what car-makers mean when they talk about platforms in 2018. A highly modular way of constructing cars that allows flexibility.
3. "Manufacturing line efficiency" means being flexible enough to make what you need to make, when you need to make it, so that the line is properly utilised. Here's a photo of the production line at Nissan's plant in the UK, with a Qashqai (red) immediately followed by a Leaf (silver) and another Qashqai (blue) - the car in front of the Qashqai is a third model.
The ability of lines to produce multiple models was also referenced in the article I linked. Using standardised interfaces between the blocks used to create a car, as you see with these new platforms, actually leads to increased efficiencies because the cars are all assembled in a similar way.
4. Driven wheels are not an integral part of a platform. Let's be simplistic: take out the half shafts of your AWD, and you have a RWD. There is nothing physically preventing a RWD car being derived from an AWD platform. If you kept the pre-2010s definition of platform, it might be difficult to make a FWD platform into AWD or RWD (no transmission tunnel, like the Passat chassis above), but if a rolling chassis can handle AWD, it can handle RWD.
And the state of the art now is that any rolling chassis is just one of many possible implementations of a platform.
AWD is simply part of Subaru's philosophy. They were talking about symmetric AWD long before the BRZ existed. It does not preclude their platform being used for RWD; if anything their focus on
symmetric AWD makes any such platform perfect for use in RWD. By contrast, VW's MQB is geared towards transverse engines, which make less sense for RWD - but even then it's not impossible to do.
The only thing you got right is that none of us know for certain. Your arguments that Subaru's platform can't be used, or would be inherently unsuitable, for the next-gen twins are simply wrong.