PLATFORM SHARING vs BADGE ENGINEERING
There’s a substantial difference between badge engineering and platform sharing, but both have the same aim: saving money by maximising the common parts between cars.
Badge engineering at its most extreme is just that, the resultant cars being 99.9% identical, as per the Toyota Yaris and Mazda 2 Hybrid.
A more convincing method of creating two – or many – distinctly different cars is to share a platform, thereby saving a heap of money.
It was much easier in the days when cars had separate chassis, as Chrysler, Ford and General Motors endlessly demonstrated in the US last century. The process is harder if it’s the lower half of a monocoque bodyshell that you’re trying to share across models.
However, the Volkswagen Group got this down to a fine art in the late 1990s with its thrillingly labelled PQ34 platform. Models as disparate as the Audi A3, Volkswagen Beetle, Audi TT, Volkswagen Golf and Skoda Yeti shared a core, which included the floor, sills, front bulkhead, suspension, air conditioning and electronics plus plentiful powertrains.
Today, it’s the MQB platform that does this industrial heavy lifting. This component is so versatile that both ICE and electric cars can be built from the same hardware, ranging from the Volkswagen Polo to the massive Usmarket Volkswagen Atlas. So far, the group has sold more than 32 million Mqb-based vehicles, yielding cost savings that badge engineering alone could never achieve.
But platform strategies require years of planning and the resources of a small country. Badge engineering, by contrast, can fill a gap in little more than a year for minimal cost. And that’s why it won’t be going away.