Lessons from the Shift Between Luxury and Mass-Market Automaking

Discussion with Samuele Sois

With over two decades of international experience across aerospace and automotive, spanning McLaren, Jaguar Land Rover, Bentley, and Tata Motors Design Tech Centre, Samuele Sois bridges craftsmanship and scale as both a Principal Design Engineer and a Principal Data Science & AI Engineer. His career has taken him across Europe, the Americas, and APAC, leading end‑to‑end programs on interior and exterior trim, kinematics, and perceived quality while pioneering real‑time ergonomics tools and PLM/BI architectures. Now a PhD researcher in Automotive AI & Cybersecurity at the University of Birmingham, Sois explores how engineering philosophy shifts between luxury and massmarket vehicles. 

Precision and Pragmatism: Managing Tolerances Across Markets

In luxury engineering, perfection is the standard. “At McLaren, I remember consistently applying tolerances around half a millimetre, when not less!” Sois recalls. That level of precision is unattainable in high‑volume production, where every additional decimal point of tolerance translates directly into higher costs.

Mass‑market engineers must instead rely on ingenuity and what Sois calls “dimensional variation analysis,” a set of techniques designed to mask or minimize visual inconsistencies without overspending. These approaches allow components to fit seamlessly even when tolerances are broader. “When money is not budgeted for advanced tolerance analysis, it’s time to use engineering acumen and sheer talent,” Sois explains.

Luxury manufacturers can afford over‑engineering, while mass‑market companies must excel in clever engineering, balancing form and function, precision and scalability. One prioritizes limitless refinement; the other thrives on intelligent compromises that maintain quality within strict financial constraints.

The Cost of Perfection: How Customer Expectations Shape Development

In the luxury segment, customer expectations can redefine entire projects overnight. “Once, at the very end of the prototype cycle of the McLaren P1, Ron Dennis looked at the fully functioning prototype and said, ‘I don’t like the colour too much. You know what? I don’t like the car too much either. Redo the entire thing from scratch,’” Sois recalls.

Such a demand, he notes, would be disastrous for a mass‑market manufacturer, where each late‑stage revision can cost millions. “Late changes cost real money in mass‑market OEMs, and the allowed leeway reduces significantly at the end of every major milestone,” Sois explains.

This contrast illustrates how engineering governance differs fundamentally between segments. Luxury design is iterative and visionary; mass‑market development is structured and risk‑averse. Where one values creative reinvention, the other demands discipline and predictability, each achieving excellence within its own operational boundaries.

Material Innovation and the Pursuit of Sustainability

Luxury vehicles often introduce exotic materials, carbon fibre, hand‑stitched leather, bespoke metal finishes, while mass‑market cars depend on evocation rather than replication. “High‑volume vehicles simply have to evoke such materials, with coatings, films, and even plastic injection techniques that mimic these,” Sois explains.

What was once an aesthetic exercise has evolved into an environmental mandate. “Where significant expense is done is in material research and development; not in the pursuit of quality or luxury but looking to obtain eco‑compatible materials with the lowest possible ecological impact and the highest possible circularity,” Sois notes.

With regulators mandating up to 90% of vehicle materials to be recycled, sustainability has become a core engineering discipline. Recycled inputs bring challenges, variability, reduced strength, inconsistent behaviour, but also enable weight reduction and circular manufacturing. “Sustainability is quite a forced march right now,” Sois says. “It’s both a complication and an accelerator.”

The Psychology of Touch: Engineering Perceived Quality

True craftsmanship in automotive design extends beyond mechanical precision, it is about perception. “Perceived quality is like the good showmanship of a seasoned magician,” Sois says. “The trick is capturing the attention of the audience and letting them ignore what you don’t want them to see.”

Engineers meticulously tune each “touchpoint”: the feel of a switch, the softness of a dashboard, the satisfying thud of a closing door. “Nobody would know what lies behind the firewall of the car, or between the floor and the underbody, but everybody would hear, and appreciate!, the nice sound of the door closing,” Sois explains.

These sensory elements bridge cost efficiency and emotional connection, ensuring that even an affordable car feels premium. Engineering thus becomes not just a technical pursuit but a psychological one, the art of making complexity appear effortless.

AI, Simulation, and the Human Element

Artificial intelligence is transforming design and testing by acting as an intelligent collaborator. According to Sois, simulation and AI tools provide engineers with rapid, data-driven insights that help them make better-informed decisions while minimizing repetitive manual work. By automating the most routine aspects of design, these technologies allow engineers to focus on higher-level creative and analytical challenges, ultimately enhancing both efficiency and innovation.

Still, AI has limits. “AI is prone to hallucinations,” Sois warns. “A recent Nio presentation showed how the AI assumes any pedestrian impact with the boot surface induces deformation, which is correct. But it also assumes that if the pedestrian lies on the same ‘endless plane’ of the boot, the same deformation would occur, even if the pedestrian is adjacent to the car. This is obviously not how physics work.”

The greater risk, Sois argues, is the erosion of human judgment. “AI, simulation, and data science are not shortcuts but tools to reduce risk and achieve a better vision. They should free engineers from repetitive work, enabling them to focus on the aspects that customers truly notice.”

The Future of AI and Engineering Governance

As AI matures, it brings both opportunity and complexity. Automated tolerance analysis, texture synthesis, and topology optimization are already helping mass‑market vehicles achieve luxury‑level precision. “The price of luxury is bound to go down, thanks to cost‑efficient optimization,” Sois says.

But with progress comes governance risk. “AI introduces a lot of complexity in model governance, human oversight can weaken when AI is involved; explainability, a fully automated design AI might work on the ‘black box’ principle; and supplier maturity,” Sois warns. For this reason, human engineers remain essential custodians of integrity and creativity.

Sois also emphasizes transparent and explainable AI (XAI), especially as technology begins interpreting emotion or behaviour. “The entire AI pipeline, from dataset creation and training to the neural networks’ inner workings, must be laid bare for all to see,” he explains. “AI is, for all intents and purposes, just glorified statistics… We can and should explain it to everyone as such.”

Key Takeaways for Executives

Before closing the discussion, Sois distilled his perspective into three central principles that capture the intersection of human intuition, governance, and technology in modern engineering:

1. Human touch remains irreplaceable. The sound of a latch, the motion of a door, and the tactile feedback of controls define emotional quality in engineering.
2. AI requires governance, not mystique. Transparency, consent, and safety are the foundations of trustworthy innovation.
3. Technology should elevate creativity, not replace it. Automation must free engineers to focus on design, vision, and craftsmanship, the qualities customers value most.

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