McMurtry's inspection team uses a coordinate measuring machine to check every upright before it goes into a customer car. The technician explains why: if the bearing fit is even slightly off, the bearings either fall out or get damaged, and the whole outboard assembly fails. The system they use traces directly to a probe invented by the company's founder more than 60 years ago while he was working on the Concorde engine. The technology is that old. The tolerance requirement has not changed. In the factory tour series that McMurtry has just begun publishing, this moment in the inspection room is easy to scroll past. It should not be.
Precision is either in the process or it isn't. David Coulthard drove the Gen4 Formula E car at Monaco this week and described a sensation he could not quite find words for. He has won at that circuit twice, in Formula 1, which is not a small sample size. What he felt on corner exit with the Gen4's permanent four-wheel drive was, in his words, unlike anything he had experienced in a racing car. That feeling is the output of engineers who spent years working out how to make AWD function at the loads and speeds of single-seater racing without the handling becoming unpredictable. The result is a car that a seasoned Monaco winner finds genuinely surprising. That gap between what existed before and what exists now was not luck.
Robert Llewellyn has been covering the EV transition for nearly 16 years. The interview Everything Electric published this week to mark his 70th birthday contains a moment that is worth noting: he went to the BBC in 2009 to pitch the show, they did not understand what he was describing, and he went and made it himself on YouTube anyway. He also mentions seeing BYD at Geneva in 2009 and concluding they would never amount to anything. The honesty there is its own form of precision. He got a lot of the big picture right because he was paying attention to details that most media was ignoring. He got one thing spectacularly wrong because he was not paying attention to a specific company. Both outcomes follow the same logic.
Then there is the 2019 Audi e-tron with a rear motor catch reservoir full of pink coolant. The rotor seal on these water-cooled induction motors was designed with a labyrinth system to keep coolant out of the windings. Everyone in the repair community now knows it basically fails eventually. The catch reservoir exists, it seems, because someone anticipated this. The motor on this particular car is still fine: the reservoir has done its job. But that reservoir is now full, the seal is clearly progressing toward failure, and the question is whether the extended Audi warranty will cover it before it crosses the line or after. The detail that was not quite right in the original design is the detail that now determines the cost.
Bottom line: Today's stories make the same point from four different directions. McMurtry and the Formula E engineers got the details right through patience and iteration. Llewellyn built 16 years of credibility by paying close attention to the right things. The e-tron's rotor seal did not get it quite right, and seven years later that small gap is the thing that matters most to the owner. You can usually tell which category a piece of engineering falls into. It just sometimes takes a few years to find out.