Chapter 302: Cost of Ordinary

The next morning, Ernest arrived at the Helmarte regional headquarters at precisely seven forty-two.

Arthur Pendelton was already there.

This immediately annoyed Ernest.

It was not because Arthur had arrived early. Punctuality was an admirable virtue, even if Arthur rarely practiced it without an ulterior motive.

No, what annoyed Ernest was that Arthur was comfortably reclining behind the desk in Ernest’s private office, feet propped near a blotter, drinking Ernest’s personal roast of imported highland coffee.

"You have your own office down the hall," Ernest pointed out, standing in the doorway with his leather briefcase.

Arthur lowered his morning newspaper by an inch. "Mine doesn’t have this particular coffee."

"It is the exact same roasted bean from the executive commissary pantry."

"Then yours tastes better purely because it is stolen," Arthur replied smoothly, taking another slow sip.

Ernest sighed, walked inside, and set his briefcase down on the wooden desk with a deliberate thud.

Arthur’s sharp eyes darted down instantly. He spotted the black leather-bound notebook tucked under Ernest’s arm.

"No," Arthur said immediately, lowering the newspaper completely.

Ernest froze. "I haven’t said a single word yet."

"You visited two commercial motorcar dealerships yesterday afternoon."

Ernest narrowed his eyes. "How do you already know that?"

"Because one dealer sent me an ecstatic three-page telegram explaining that the esteemed founder and chairman of the Teucher Industrial Group personally designed a standardized used-motorcar certification checklist right on his showroom floor," Arthur said dryly.

Ernest pulled out his chair and sat down. "The secondary market lacks consistent quality standards. It needed one."

"Of course it did." Arthur neatly folded his newspaper. "And the other dealership manager informed me that you personally counseled a prospective buyer out of purchasing a brand-new vehicle by proving it wouldn’t save his family a single copper coin."

"It wouldn’t have saved them money," Ernest countered reasonably. "His household would have been burdened by the interest."

"You are an extraordinary salesman, Ernest. Truly an inspiration to the commercial board."

"I am an engineer, not a salesman."

"Thank God for small mercies," Arthur muttered, refilling his porcelain cup.

Ernest opened his notebook. Across the top of the fresh page, written in bold, clean block lettering, was the heading:

MODEL ONE — AFFORDABILITY

Arthur leaned forward. His amused smirk faded, replaced by the weary expression of a senior director who could already smell impending disaster.

"Ah," Arthur murmured softly.

Ernest looked up from his notes. "What?"

"There it is. The harbinger of doom."

"What problem?"

"The exact problem that is going to consume the next six months of my life, keep me trapped in smoke-filled committee rooms, and cost our treasury several hundred thousand riels in retooling."

Hollen arrived exactly twenty-three minutes later.

He had caught the dawn express train from the industrial manufacturing district. Ernest had summoned him the previous evening with a telegram containing just six blunt words:

Need to make Model One cheaper.

Hollen had apparently spent the entire two-hour railway journey stewing in righteous mechanical outrage. He kicked the office door open with his boot, tossed his heavy wool coat onto the coat rack, marched directly up to Ernest’s desk, and planted both palms on the mahogany wood.

"No," Hollen stated flatly.

Arthur leaned back, pointing his coffee spoon at the engineer. "You see that? That is the voice of seasoned operational experience."

Ernest frowned up at his chief production engineer. "You don’t even know what I am proposing yet."

"You want a cheaper automobile," Hollen said bluntly.

"Yes."

"Then my answer remains an emphatic no."

"Why?"

"Because whenever you say the word ’cheaper,’ six months later I find myself standing in the middle of an expanded factory complex twice the size of the old one, surrounded by three hundred new machine tools and forty unproven metallurgical formulas!"

Arthur nodded vigorously from the corner. "He speaks the absolute truth."

Hollen pulled up a wooden chair, turned it around, and sat down with a heavy grunt. "And before you start throwing wild concepts at me, let us set basic ground rules. We are not thinning the chassis frame rail steel."

"I wasn’t going to suggest that," Ernest said calmly.

"Good."

"We are not reducing the grade of the roller bearings."

"Good."

"We are not trimming the diameter of the brake drums."

"Good."

"And we are certainly not removing the passenger-side headlamp to save copper."

Hollen blinked, pausing mid-breath. "Wait. Why not?"

Ernest stared at him with an unreadable expression.

Hollen squinted suspiciously. "Were you testing me?"

"No," Ernest said, keeping his face entirely deadpan.

"You absolutely were."

"No, I was not."

Ernest reached into his briefcase and pulled out a thick stack of organized documents. He spread them neatly across the wide mahogany surface: dealership monthly sales logs, factory unit costs, warranty claims from the first ten thousand production units, component service records, used-vehicle transaction values, and partnered bank financing ledgers.

Arthur reached across and picked up the financing summaries, skimming the figures. "How cheap are we talking, Ernest? What is the final retail figure?"

Ernest leaned back into his leather chair. "Eventually?"

Arthur pinched the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes.

Hollen burst out laughing. "Never ask him that question, Arthur! You know better than to ask an idealist for an eventual figure!"

Ernest ignored the banter. "Eventually, I want the vehicle priced low enough that automobile ownership is no longer a luxury reserved for landed nobles, wealthy factory barons, and elite urban professionals."

Arthur raised a skeptical eyebrow. "That is an inspiring social philosophy, Ernest, but it is not a commercial figure. Give me a concrete number."

Ernest hesitated for a moment. "I do not have an exact number yet."

The room went completely silent.

Hollen leaned forward, his bushy eyebrows knotting together in genuine astonishment. "You dragged me out of bed before sunrise, made me ride a freezing morning passenger train to Helmarte, and threw me into your office without an actual target price?"

"I asked you here because picking a random number out of thin air before analyzing where the money actually goes is terrible engineering," Ernest replied evenly.

Hollen stared at him for three full seconds. Then, slowly, a grin spread across his scarred, oil-stained face.

"Good heavens," Hollen chuckled. "Marriage has genuinely civilized you."

Arthur nodded gravely. "Lady Eleanor’s influence is nothing short of miraculous. A year ago, he would have demanded we slash twenty thousand riels from the sticker price by next Tuesday and told us to figure out the physics later."

Ernest looked between his two closest colleagues. "I was perfectly capable of disciplined financial analysis before I married, gentlemen."

"Of course you were," Arthur said soothingly.

"Without question," Hollen agreed in an identical patronizing tone.

Neither man sounded even remotely convincing.

By nine-fifteen in the morning, the three of them had relocated down the corridor into the large executive conference room.

They were joined by department heads from across the Teucher Motorcar Company: Plant One manufacturing foremen, senior purchasing agents, factory cost accountants, chassis engineers, and service network coordinators.

A junior accountant stepped up to the massive slate blackboard and pinned up the comprehensive manufacturing cost breakdown for a standard four-passenger Model One.

Every single riel was laid bare. Raw steel billets. Drop-forged connecting rods. Hand-fitted brass radiator tanks. Imported vulcanized rubber tires. Factory labor hours per chassis. Carriage varnish coats. Dealer delivery freight.

Ernest stood up from his chair. "Before anyone opens their mouth: nobody proposes removing functional parts today."

Across the long table, three junior design engineers quietly lowered their graphite pencils and crossed out their initial notes.

Arthur watched them with a quiet smirk. "Did you already know they were planning to gut the accessories?"

"Of course," Ernest said.

"How?"

"Because when I was twenty-two, cutting accessories is the first thing I would have done to lower costs."

Hollen chuckled in agreement.

Ernest stepped up to the blackboard, picking up a piece of chalk. "We are not here to design a stripped-down, inferior motorcar. We are here to understand precisely why this vehicle costs seventy-five thousand riels to put on the road."

That distinction changed the entire atmosphere in the room.

The Model One’s production cost had already dropped substantially since the earliest hand-built prototypes. Plant One had settled into a steady assembly cadence. Raw material suppliers had expanded their capacity. The rate of defective foundry castings was steadily declining, and tooling costs were being amortized across thousands of rolling chassis.

Yet, despite those gains, the cost curve had hit a stubborn plateau.

Some components had become remarkably inexpensive through mass production. Others remained infuriatingly costly.

Custom coachwork was expensive. Precision engine machining consumed hours of lathe time. Rubber tires remained tied to overseas supply chains. Luxurious upholstery demanded hand-cutting by skilled craftsmen.

Ernest ran his finger down the procurement ledger, stopping at a seemingly minor entry. He tapped the chalk against the slate.

"Fasteners," Ernest announced.

The purchasing director cleared his throat and nodded. "We currently maintain forty-seven distinct standard bolt and screw specifications across the Model One assembly line."

Ernest stopped cold.

Hollen caught the dangerous stillness in Ernest’s posture. "Oh, no."

"What?" Arthur asked, glancing up.

"He’s personally offended by the hardware," Hollen whispered.

Ernest turned slowly toward the purchasing director. "Forty-seven different fasteners?"

"Yes, My Lord."

"Why?"

The room went completely dead.

A senior draftsman adjusted his collar nervously. "Well, sir... the chassis team developed their frame mounts independently from the engine division. The steering linkages required specific thread pitches from an outside firm, and the bodybuilders prefer their own traditional coach bolts for securing the timber framework."

"That is a historical explanation," Ernest said coldly. "It is not a functional justification."

"It is technically an answer," Arthur pointed out from his seat.

"It is a dreadful answer," Ernest replied.

He turned back to the blackboard and scrawled a massive number: 47.

"How many standard thread sizes and bolt lengths do we actually require to hold this machine together safely?" Ernest demanded.

Nobody answered. Nobody had ever bothered to audit the bolts as a unified system.

That irritated Ernest more than an engine misfire.

For the next two hours, the executive board of the kingdom’s largest automobile manufacturer did not discuss corporate strategy, royal contracts, or international exports.

They argued about bolts.

Arthur eventually rested his forehead against the green felt of the conference table, groaning softly. Hollen, however, remained intensely engaged. Unlike the commercial directors, Hollen had worked on oily assembly floors. He understood the hidden operational nightmare of unnecessary variation.

Different bolt heads meant mechanics needed five different wrenches to assemble a single front axle.

Different thread pitches meant stockrooms had to maintain forty-seven separate storage bins.

Different lengths created endless opportunities for a tired factory worker on the evening shift to thread a long bolt into a shallow blind hole, bottoming out the threads and leaving a suspension mount loose.

By lunchtime, through aggressive standardization, forty-seven fastener types had been reduced to twenty-nine—without altering a single structural calculation on the vehicle.

"We can get it down to twenty-four," Ernest insisted, staring at the remaining list.

The chief chassis engineer wiped sweat from his brow. "Twenty-seven, My Lord. We cannot compromise on the shear strength of the steering knuckle pins."

"Twenty-five."

"Twenty-six is our absolute engineering limit, sir. Otherwise, we risk thread stripping on the aluminum transmission casing."

Ernest studied the schematic for several seconds, then set down his chalk. "Twenty-six is acceptable."

Arthur lifted his head from the table, blinking in mock disbelief. "Did I just witness the great Baron Teucher agree to a compromise?"

"Twenty-six standard bolts reduces our fastener inventory overhead by nearly forty percent," Ernest said smoothly. "That is not a compromise. That is basic arithmetic."

Arthur looked across at Hollen. "Definitely married."

"Without a doubt," Hollen grinned.