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Comment by encoderer | Hacker News Reader

On the Mercedes AMG performance line, a single master craftsman builds the engine by himself. His signature is on the engine block. Mercedes doing something like this is interesting but they are a niche, luxury manufacturer (though they are the largest luxury brand at least in the us and maybe world wide). A change like this at Toyota would be more interesting to me.

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I don't think I'd use the phrase "master craftsman" unless my paycheck came from their marketing dept.

Being able to do a high quality, consistent job assembling engine after engine is not a huge feat, it just takes a lot of attention to detail. Being able to spec out and effectively execute a particular engine build is on a whole different level and the latter is what I'd be more inclined to call a "craftsman"

The former doesn't need to care (but they likely do since anyone with that job probably does automotive stuff as a hobby) about things like how camshaft specs, rod length, piston velocity, intake design and about a million other variables interact with each other to affect performance of the whole system. The latter needs to be intimately familiar with them while also being able to do the job of the former.

To put it in terms more people on HN will understand, the guy assembling the engine is like the user of some backed software stack. Sure they might write some scripts that interact with parts of the stack but they're nowhere near as well versed in how does what it does and why it does things the way it does when compared to the engineer who designed and built the stack.

„Meister“ (literally “master” in English) is just the certificate you get after finishing some vocational trainings in Germany (includes theory and practice).

Vocational training is still somewhat widespread in Germany (for jobs like mechanics, hairdressers, even sys admins, some more rote programming jobs, …) also as an alternative to going to university.

Now, I’m not sure whether typical assembly line workers have that kind of education (probably not? but I’m not sure), so having someone with this kind of education assemble your engine for you might be a step up, but I also think there is a mismatch going on here between what the English words seem to imply and what the German word means.

I assume it's something like being a "master mechanic" but it seems like a fishy marketing move to call them "craftsmen" so they can say "master craftsmen" when they basically mean "certified technicians."

The best selling luxury manufacturer in the US is BMW. They're followed by Lexus and Mercedes-Benz, but those two aren't far behind either. Toyota took a similar approach to how AMG cars are created when they made the Lexus LFA. They only built 500 models of the LFA, but those were all custom ordered and buyers had a huge array of options to choose from: http://www.lexus.com/lexus-share/v2/img/models/LFA/explore/L...

http://www.statista.com/statistics/287620/luxury-vehicles-un...

> A change like this at Toyota would be more interesting to me.

from 2014: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-04-06/humans-rep...

Yes, I came to make this comment. Toyota has been very vocal about making this change. The rationale from Mr. Toyoda himself was something like:

(1) Robots are not great at improving on their own work in the same way that humans naturally are.

(2) When he was a boy, Mr. Toyoda recalled that there were always a few men around the factory who were capable of extremely creative and ingenious solutions to difficult problems of logistics or fabrication, and he feels that this skill is being lost.

Anyway, this has been a major consideration for the current management at Toyota for some time.

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