Tear Down shops analyzing new cars for automakers & suppliers

Yes they exist but I didn't know how much money they made until I read an article about one in Michigan, You deliver them a new car and they tear it down and analyze how it was built, maybe estimating the cost of processes to make parts, and on and on. i forget what car they were using as an example and got the numbers mixed up but the report was like 27,000 pages long and the price to the customer for the report near a million.

Now what I want to know is: do the dissemblers ask where the car came from? Do some auto industry suppliers attempt to buy the first all new model of 2022 car available to take over there? ! read once where Tesla took back a lease car and found it had been dis-assembled by unknown parties down to bare metal and reassembled before return, so maybe it went through such a shop.

Is there other stories like this known to auto engineers? Reminds me of when at a senior center I met an old guy who was one of the defecting MiG pilots that flew across the border to a US base and landed the plane in exchange for a bag of gold....

 

The purpose only makes sense if you are a rival automaker and the new car has technology that's truly state of the art, for instance even though the Lotus Emira is new new new it doesn't seem to have any new technology, indeed it's internal combustion so olod hat before it reaches the showrooms. But if there''s an all new Tesla model introduced, some rival electric car maker might want to buy one to have torn down in case ol' Elon has incorporated the newest of the new technology. Of course Teslas are festooned (boy I love that word) with cameras so Tesla, back at HQ, can see where the car is at and know this dissection (autopsy?) is taking place, that one of their boys is being dissected. And maybe Tesla can even wipe the car's electronic brain clean so the tear down artists can't download the accumulated technology. I used to see teardowns of a car at the GM Proving Grounds with wall displays of each part but that was their own car so they could see what was paid for each part