Our car experts choose every product we feature. We may earn money from the links on this page.

Slap a “handcrafted” plaque on something and the price doubles. But why?

Joe Harmon knows about working with his hands. Starting in 2006, the industrial designer from North Carolina spent about 20,000 hours (think about that amount for a second) building “the world’s only wooden supercar,” as he calls it. He carved the Harmon Splinter out of maple, ash, birch, hickory, cherry, walnut, balsa, and oak. While a Corvette engine powers the car, he handcrafted the rest of the Splinter himself, down to the wooden spokes in the wheels and even a stately Harmon logo.

This story originally appeared in Volume 12 of Road & Track.

SIGN UP FOR THE TRACK CLUB BY R&T FOR MORE EXCLUSIVE STORIES

Recently, I test-drove a Cadillac CT5-V Blackwing, which bore a plaque on its supercharged 6.2-liter V-8 that read “Handcrafted by Anthony Terry, Performance Build Center, USA.” There were no noticeable fingerprints on this hulking motor. Clearly, not one single component of this engine was actually built by hand. Mr. Terry fashioned neither connecting rods nor camshafts out of blocks of aluminum. The engine was assembled by one man, in the vein of many other high-performance powerplants from AMG, Ford, and the like. But “handcrafted”? Let’s fact-check this.

If a man pushes a button to ignite a fire that pressurizes a dynamo that creates an electric current to charge a battery that powers a motor inside the drill used to mount an electric fixture, is he any part of the process when a lightbulb is screwed into that socket by hand? Consider the creations of the absurdist inventor Simone Giertz. Inspired as a young woman by the Disney character Gyro Gearloose, today Giertz is known for building a machine that applies lipstick to your lips for you, among many other wonderfully unnecessary gizmos. If you push the button that turns on the machine that puts the lipstick on your lips, are you putting on lipstick by hand? You did, after all, choose the cherry-red hue.

If someone puts together an engine using about 600 components that were made in various places by various people, machines, computers, and robots, can we say this person “handcrafted” the engine? What exactly do these “Handcrafted by” signature nameplates mean?

“There’s a pretty easy answer to that,” says Bryan Lee, who oversees the handbuilt engine process at Cadillac’s Performance Build Center in Bowling Green, Kentucky. “The nameplate you see on these engines is a sense of pride where one individual built that engine from the beginning to the end. Every single inspection, every single test was done by a single individual. With non-handcrafted engines in other manufacturing facilities, you would have a conveyor with different people putting together different pieces of the puzzle, instead of one individual.”

Car nuts love these “handcrafted” signature plaques on engines, and for good reason. They’re a reminder that a well-made high-performance vehicle is a machine that was created using, first and foremost, human imagination. That’s why the idea of one brilliant technician building your engine is so cool. We might just suggest a fact-checking change on those nameplates: “Hand-assembled by . . .”

We’ll allow a “handcrafted” designation for cars like the Splinter. Harmon personally carved it from wood, by hand.