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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

There's an interesting contrast between the (traditional) automotive and today's consumer electronics industries; ever since the early days of cars, manufacturers have tolerated and even encouraged the growth of a large aftermarket parts industry, to the point where you can build an entire "Chrysler", "Ford", or "GM" driveline from the engine to the wheels with entirely non-OEM parts. Of course, the manufacturers themselves will sell parts to anyone who wants to buy them.

Contrast this with companies like Apple and Tesla, who attempt to maintain tight control over their products and use legal action against those who want to "open them up".

(From what I've seen, European and Asian automotive companies are somewhat less open, but once again there is still a large aftermarket.)

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Yes and working on cars is a heck of a lot of fun as a result. Car modding and tinkering is a huge hobby and from what I can tell only supports these brands and the OEM sales. You need a Chevy in the first place to outfit it with 3rd party high perf parts. Something will break as a result and you'll be back buying more parts and investing even more in the GM/Chevy ecosystem. It's the opposite of how record labels try to attack music 'pirates' who also tend to spend more on music too. (Perhaps their love of music is what correlates high piracy and high purchasing? Hmm)

It adds to the romanticism and involvement. The original GT40 Le Mans car from the 60s that originally beat Ferrari was built from parts that you could go to your local Ford dealer and order. Maybe I'm wrong but I think that if you had enough money at the time you could actually buy all of the parts to build the same .427 they were using in the professional races. Pretty cool.

Do you have a source on this? It seems like an exceptional claim.

The GT40 was a bespoke race car built to settle a grudge. Henry Ford II wanted to beat Enzo Ferrari at his own game after the sale of Ferrari to Ford fell through. Ford failed to beat Ferrari in their early attempts with the GT40 and the entire car went through several revisions to reach the LeMans winning form. These were not typical parts and I would be surprised if they were widely available.

Also, domestic US engine displacements were given in cubic inches. In this case a Ford 7 liter engine is 427 (whole) cubic inches. A period is not prefixed because it is not a fractional measure.

The 427 is an FE family engine, which was used in NASCAR. The engine used in the gt40 was based in a NASCAR build of the engine (modified to handle right turns ;) ).

Back then, you could order performance parts from dealerships and whole engines. Could you walk in and order a gt40 engine? I have looked and have not found a part number. However, some race engines did not have part numbers because they were aftermarket parts.

You still can, and they have warranties.

https://performanceparts.ford.com/engines/

http://www.chevrolet.com/performance/crate-engines

http://www.chevrolet.com/performance/connect-cruise-powertra... up to 727 horsepower, with transmission and electronics included and ready to go. Connect and Cruise.

Crate engines are nothing new but are any of those the engine for the GT40?

Those crate engines sure are a great deal. Back in the 90s you had to get an aftermarket block, heads, crank, pistons, and rods for four that (not adjusted for inflation) to even consider reliably making over 400hp on anything. I remember saving money for an A4 Ford block sold by SVE. Never got it cause it was about $2k and came bare and unfinished.

Nowadays, an LS crate engine and a smallish turbo can get you 600 wheel horsepower on pump gas.

Not sure about the entire car but bob riley’s Art of race car design backs up that the gt40 mk1 had a lot of off the shelf parts in it https://www.amazon.com/Art-Race-Car-Design/dp/191058410X/ref...

This intrigued me enough to peruse car makers' web sites, and the result was worth creating an account to share.

Chevy has an extensive offering of "crate engines", given equal billing with its performance car models. Ford also has a "performance parts" site selling everything from engines on down. I had no idea.

I couldn't find anything similar for Toyota or BMW; their "performance" parts catalogs seem to consist only of superficial accessories like steering wheel covers.

> I couldn't find anything similar for Toyota or BMW

Not quite true. Toyota Racing Development (TRD) does sell performance accessories (superchargers) for some engines. BMW has M Performance and you could put some of the M Performance parts on a non M vehicle if you wanted to.

Other manufacturers also sell fully built race cars for customers to buy and race (Blancpain GT Race series).

https://www.blancpain-gt-series.com/cars

I've built my last few performance "Apples" almost entirely from non-OEM parts.

Apple has been pretty lenient with the Hackintosh community -- but that may be coming to an end, if Apple moves away from intel.

for what its worth, automotive third party parts are protected by law in the USA due to similar shenanigans, back when the government wasnt quite so blatently pro entrenched interests.

I have some degree of empathy for Tesla here because of the current state of media coverage of self driving vehicles. Any self driving vehicle is isolated, magnified, and repeated ad nauseam.

If accepting that people can die if they make poor decisions, which they ought be allowed to, was a thing - I would be right there with you. But today everybody wants somebody to blame for everything, especially with new technologies, and when freedom enables people to make bad decisions that can hurt a manufacturer much more than help them.

While their primary motivation might be greed, I'm not convinced it is. Apple on the other hand...

There is a massive aftermarket parts industry for Japanese cars.

You can get aftermarket non-OEM versions of practically every part except for the chassis for old Nissan Skylines and Silvias.

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