The long way to a car newsletter

Marsel has spent his career in what most people would call dream jobs. Day to day, the work was mostly tolerance stacks, cost models, and arguing with suppliers, and that turned out to be the interesting part.

He started at a global Tier One automotive supplier, first in advanced manufacturing, building the assembly lines that produce powertrain modules, then in project management, running CapEx and tooling analysis for xEV programs with major OEMs.

From there he moved to Scuderia Cameron Glickenhaus. Volumes were tiny, the race cars ran at Le Mans, and the road cars were driven across Europe and North America. His job was redesigning components so they could actually be built, and moving a large share of the supply base from Europe to North America without stopping production.

Much of that work lived between “we think this works” and “we can hand this to a customer”: prototype validation, crash testing, powertrain and emissions testing, and durability runs on the track and on public roads. The road runs regularly turned up problems the proving ground didn’t.

Most recently, he led a mechanical design team at ASML, which builds the machines that print semiconductors. A modern car has around 30,000 parts. An EUV lithography machine has roughly 700,000, costs more than a small run of hypercars, and ships in dozens of freight containers. Its mirrors are so smooth that, scaled to the size of Germany, the largest bump would be under a millimeter.

Away from work, he keeps a small collection of Mercedes and BMWs, including an R129 SL500, a CL600, and an M5 Competition that has done laps at Lime Rock, and he does his own work on them.

Daily Downshift comes out of both sides of that: how cars get designed, costed, tested, and compromised, and what it’s like to own and maintain them afterward.