Chris Porritt, formerly chief platform manager for Aston Martin, has joined Tesla. This looks to fill the void when Peter Rawlinson left the company in early 2012. Tesla Hires New Engineering VP From Luxury Maker Aston Martin
heh. I remember all the hubbub and doom and gloom surrounding that. Looks like Tesla did just fine. So, what is the platform manager responsible for? Car handling and such, or do we mean platform as in the underpinnings that are used across multiple products on the same platform?
Hmmmm. Who designed that thing? Hmmmm - - - Updated - - - Anybody have a snapshot of the stock dive that day?
I would think a 'Platform Manager' would mostly try to keep parts and manufacturing practices thes same (or as same as possible) across all vehicles on a platform. Instuting changes on a platform to reduce costs/increase reliability/increase production speed, and make sure all cars on that platform would be similarly affected. Also pushing changes to a platform, where all cars would be changed similarly. Basically instead of the X getting AWD, a platform manager would attempt to allow AWD to be added to all cars on the platform. Or if that is not wanted from a business perspective all the shuffling under the frunk would be done for all platform cars so you only manufacture one configuration, but only the X having an AWD unit added. I don't know. But this would be my guess at what someone with this title would be doing.
More commentary in the press on this new hire: Aston Martin engineering VP moves to Tesla Motors | Digital Trends Very positive...
Up .69 aftermarket trading now trading at $60.19 The Aston Martin One 77 cost 1.2 million pounds converted to $1.86 Million
This reminds me of then Apple made Jonathan Ive an SVP. They knew they had the best tech - now surround it by the best design mind who want's to take a great thing to an even better place.