You are entitled to disagree, and so do I with your comment. It doesn't matter what the type of car is, from cheap and cheerful up to luxury, a car manufacturer still has to do their homework correctly to make money to fund new designs. Cost estimating was (and still is, all car manufactures from RR downwards still use it!) costing the price of each part and it's assembly, you could still use expensive bit as long as the car was still affordable for it's chosen market at the end. It was not doing things on the cheap, but making sure that the price you were selling your car for actually made money, something BMC got very wrong with their models of the 60s. Any manufacture that wants to survive does it, whether that be Mercedes or Ford.