Production part approval process

And if you know automotive manufacturing, you know scaling to that volume requires terrifying quality discipline.

You're dealing with IATF 16949 certification, massive VDA documentation, and full PPAP approval.

You simply cannot maintain statistical process control at 300,000 units a year.

if there is any uncontrolled randomness from part to part.

And that's why performance to some extent comes first, but cost is very, very close behind.

The first step in that material feedstock then concerns itself with the question, does the material meet the design and performance specifications that our engineering teams have set forth? And then the next question that comes to mind is, does the material source deliver consistent and repeatable performance parameters over large-scale production volumes? So translating this, we're essentially looking for materials that meet our engineering specs and deliver against supplier PPAP specifications.

already asking for established material sources.

The question of cost seems obvious in paper, but there's also elements of risk that have to be incorporated.

And it would take prototypes after prototype to get an engineering change pushed through in the United States, in the West, North America.

North America for the car guys, they called it the PPAP process, the production part approval process.

But nowadays, it's software that will create new features and things like that.

So the reason I say all that and explain all that is because the involution has increased the speed of development.