What does it take to start a car company or build cars from the ground up?
- Thread starter Dormianu
- 13 comments
- 469 views
- 566
- United Kingdom
It certainly won’t be overnight, but at your age you have plenty of time to make it happen.
For a start you may be able to learn quite a lot about motor vehicle engineering by acquiring something like a dirt or a quad bike and learning absolutely everything you can about how it works.
Just be careful not to hurt yourself.
Last edited:
- 1,020
- Madison, WI
- FerrariF1GT
- FerrariFan24
Do you have lots of money? If not, you’ll need to find investors who’ll be willing to put their nose into your company and persuade them that your product will sell and turn a profit for them.
And unless you’re willing to do all the research and work that goes into designing and building a car yourself (there’s plenty of resources out there; nobody is stopping you), you’ll need to hire people to do that, and they will want to be paid lots of money.
Take some business and engineering classes while you’re still in school. Borrow some books from the library. I hope you like math because I suspect you’ll need to know calculus to be successful in the engineering and economics sides of things.
And unless you’re willing to do all the research and work that goes into designing and building a car yourself (there’s plenty of resources out there; nobody is stopping you), you’ll need to hire people to do that, and they will want to be paid lots of money.
Take some business and engineering classes while you’re still in school. Borrow some books from the library. I hope you like math because I suspect you’ll need to know calculus to be successful in the engineering and economics sides of things.
UKMikey
Premium
- 18,084
- Grea'er Laandan
- UKMikeyA
- UKMikeyA
- 2,170
- Germany
Summary, you need a vision of a car that does not yet exist so customers would be tempted to buy yours instead of any other car+ either:
- lots of knowlegde and time to build your car yourself, resulting in a very low volume production, better find some friends during your time learning everything necessary who share your vision.
- huge amounts of money to pay for all those people doing the work for you, making your vision a reality.
- 50,795
- Australia
- SpacedustDaddy
What’s the product? One seat? Two seats? Coupe, sedan, van, pick up?
Just make sure it has a device for connectivity. That’s seems to be most current consumers care about. Look at what cars people are buying today and what they’ll be buying by the time you turn twenty.
Automatic transmission, seats four, fits two to four rolling suitcases, easy to get in and out for a woman of about 5’4”, easy to adjust for driver comfort, power windows/door locks and all the driver safety aids. Time and mileage length of factory warranty. The longer the better, in both categories.
Honestly, if I were your age today and wanting to do this(I was and wanted to design cars), I’d be door knocking at Toyota. Looking at their(and their partners) kei car segment to get a foot in the door.
Just make sure it has a device for connectivity. That’s seems to be most current consumers care about. Look at what cars people are buying today and what they’ll be buying by the time you turn twenty.
Automatic transmission, seats four, fits two to four rolling suitcases, easy to get in and out for a woman of about 5’4”, easy to adjust for driver comfort, power windows/door locks and all the driver safety aids. Time and mileage length of factory warranty. The longer the better, in both categories.
Honestly, if I were your age today and wanting to do this(I was and wanted to design cars), I’d be door knocking at Toyota. Looking at their(and their partners) kei car segment to get a foot in the door.
- 11,197
- Sweden
- eran0004
You need a degree in engineering, a degree in business management and a degree in industrial design.
Then you need investors.
So if you’re at least four friends, then three of you can go for each of the degrees and the fourth one will try to get rich and/or influential enough to secure the investments.
Then you need investors.
So if you’re at least four friends, then three of you can go for each of the degrees and the fourth one will try to get rich and/or influential enough to secure the investments.
- 2,901
- Columbus, Ohio
Alternatively if you see a market segment that's been severely underdeveloped and the have the ability to make people think you're a tech genius, you can just bypass the first three parts and secure enough investment capital to lure people who actually are tech geniuses away from their current jobs, which makes things a bit quicker.
