Plastic automotive parts are expensive. The cost of raw plastic feed stock keeps going up. The engineering involved. The application and durability testing. The lead time. Even importing from China or India becomes expensive. Cost cost cost! So what to do?Change your paradigm.

Take a walk through a toy store. Really look at some of todays toys. These toys represent the automotive suppliers of tomorrow. Japan started with toys in the 1950s and 1960s then started shipping car parts and cars to the world. China has been making toys for years, now car parts and cars. Turn over your kid’s toys and see where they are made.

Maybe you should find out who makes these toys and get ahead of everyone else?

There is more involved in making toys than the general automotive engineer may believe, without a snicker or two.

Here’s a scenario to consider:
Name brand (Fisher-Price) dinosaur toy sells retail for $10. Typically retailer’s cost from the manufacturer is 50% of that (clothing industry tends toward 30% of retail price). So what do you get for $5? Compare your last automotive part against these offerings..

Multi-part vacuum mold display container with 4-5 color printed die-cut cardboard backer and insert (that are case & pallet packed for retail shipment).

Toy complete plastic weight 12oz x $1/lb = $0.75 total raw plastic cost. The plastic feed stock has to be a pure color since many of the parts will have unpainted visible surfaces. There are requirements for bite strength (so a two-year old can’t bite off a claw), the parts can’t shatter (causing choking hazards), and the plastic must hold paint durably enough to play outside on rocks and concrete. There are probably additional safety requirements that a toy manufacturer needs to incorporate into the finished product as well. So the plastic may actually be slightly more expensive, maybe $1 in plastic.

Engineered fits are required between the parts so they snap together, articulate, and have mechanisms (this particular dinosaur has a lever that makes the front legs slash and claw at pretend opponents as well as movable thigh and knee joints, two tail joints, a movable head and a jaw joint). The caveman has dual-swivel arms and traditional single swivel legs. These parts require high unit volume injection molding tooling and compensation for shrinkage and flow cooling distortions.

The dinosaur has 15 different molded parts. The caveman has 7 and there are three other loose parts – a dinosaur saddle, a spear and the caveman’s bone armor vest.

The dinosaur is finished with 8 different colors. Some hand painting, some pad printed, some silk screen or mask printed. The caveman has six colors, his saddle has two colors, the spear is made with two colors, while his bone armor is a single unpainted color.

There is a complete assembly process to build the dinosaur designed with snap fits to avoid fastener costs. Functional requirements of the toy prohibit single direction stacking-type assembly processes that can better facilitate automated assembly machines (hind legs and tail require snapping in from their three separate directions).

Then there is the breadth of the product line – currently over 50 different main products (all in the $10-$15 retail price range) and a few under $3 and $15+ kits. Very few of the products seem to share parts (T-Rex and Triceritops dinosaurs do not resemble each other enough to assist in sharing details). The likely production run for any particular part might last three to five years before being discontinued or replaced. Some probably appear and vanish over the holiday buying spree.

So with approximately 25 parts in this example $5 toy set the manufacturer is averaging around $0.20 revenue for each part, not including packaging. Or $0.15 if the cost of plastic is removed. That’s covering all the tooling amortization (25 different tools per finished retail part number), plant and facilities, production workers, engineering, marketing, and management pay, debt recovery, and some sort of profit for the investors.

Maybe there is a reason all those dinosaur toys look so angry?

Then again, these toy manufacturers are in a competitive market that are building the skills that will enable them to enter automotive. At least that is the historical progression. So next time you are lamenting the cost of your automotive parts or trying to engineer an elegant solution to your HVAC or engine or interior problem take a break and tour the toy store isles. You might find a useful idea, a good benchmarking example (might be hard to pass through an expense account!) or at least a new manufacturer to add to your quote sourcing solicitations.

Cheers.