I was reading about the McLaren F1 (developed by Gordon Murray). This car can reach nearly 240 mph (with some minor modifications) and cost around £8.5 million to get the first car out of the door - including building the factory it was made in.

In comparison, the Bugatti Veyron can travel 10 mph faster. The other difference is that the Veyron cost around £250 million to develop - which is expensive if you only sell 300 cars. The problem with the Veyron is that the boss Ferdinand Piech set up a BFHG (big fat hairy goal) of 250 mph (okay it was 400 km/h) and 1000 brake horsepower. Unfortunately this goal came with a big fat hairy pricetag.

Gordon Murray and McLaren approached their project with a simpler goal - build the best sportscar ever. Simple but clearly challenging to meet. Bugatti (under the VW umbrella) set a massively challenging target without doing enough work to establish how feasible it was. Their smooth design created major problems with overheating due to the absence of vents. The same design led to serious stability problems culminating in spinning the car at an early public appearance. My outsider's view is that they didn't invest enough time or money early on in the concept and design phase - leading to these massive problems later on in their development and nearly six years of delay.

You have to believe the McLaren was designed hard then corrected lightly but vice versa for the Veyron. When the McLaren was built there was only one physical clash of a component against another that was not eradicated during design. The Veyron had 600 such clashes.

When companies have a big objective they need to invest early in planning and studies. Correcting a mistake on paper is several orders of magnitude less expensive than a correction during development and is far cheaper than a recall.