Opinion: is perfect the same for one person as the next?

My microwave door doesn’t fit. I don’t mean it’s falling off and preventing my rewarming of yesterday’s sausage and mash, I just mean it’s three or four millimetres down on the left. It doesn’t sit properly in the kitchen cabinet it’s built into. The main oven, directly below, isn’t actually directly below. It’s a couple of mil to the right. And the fridge door is a little wonky relative to the drawers next to it. I can’t help noticing every single morning as I get the milk. It’ll be like that in your kitchen too.

But don’t worry. You’re the only one in your household who cares, at least unless you share your life with someone else who’s spent too much time, as you have and as I have, idly examining the fit and finish of cars. What other sphere of activity manufactures with anything like the precision and consistency of the car industry? (And no, don’t hit me with microelectronics. The way light leaks around the tiles of my MacBook’s backlit keyboard tells me no one from Apple ever saw how precisely illuminated even a Fiat Panda’s climate controls are.)

The trouble with ‘handcrafted’ objects is the parts don’t consistently fit. Someone makes one part, then makes the next part to fit the first one. There’s no interchangeability with parts from another supposedly identical object, it takes too much time, and as complexity increases tolerances mount up. My kitchen, made by carpenters rather than a car factory, is the perfect example. So actually is the entire fabric of pretty well every house. Why don’t we get carmakers to advise on homebuilding? That’d surely improve the shortage, the cost and the quality.

Henry Ford gets the credit for inventing mass production using interchangeable parts. But there are earlier examples. The Royal Navy needed 100,000 pulley blocks a year for its sailing ships, and they had to be jam-proof and repairable. So in the 19th century it set up a block mill at the Portsmouth Dockyard. It used accurate lathes, standard screw sizes and novel assembly machinery.

The car companies have elevated this to such a high art that now we take perverse delight in finding the tiniest imperfection. Think how hard it must be to press two large steel panels and produce a plastic moulding (rear wing, tail panel, rear bumper) so that at their extremities they mate and form a three-dimensional aperture so precise that another complex plastic moulding, the rear light cluster, can fit into it with a borderline that’s accurate to a few tenths of a millimetre. Or consider the feat of making multiple switches, probably coming from different suppliers when they operate the climate, the windows and the ADAS, that all have exactly the same surface gloss, illumination and click-spring action.

But does it make us happy? Look at the bumper gaps and dash fit on an E30 M3. Gaping. But we still want one. And if something got knocked on an Eighties or Nineties car, you might be able to biff it back, near enough that it wouldn’t matter. These days it’s a four-figure bill to realign a bumper. Plus, every time you walk into the kitchen, the sight of the oven door sets your teeth on edge.