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> I find it hard to believe that the major car plants can no longer make assembly lines that produce more than one design on an assembly line. this is not the
by kazen44 9y ago
> I find it hard to believe that the major car plants can no longer make assembly lines that produce more than one design on an assembly line.
this is not the problem i described.
The problem is introducing a new model into an assembly line is a lot of work, and something which is not worth the effort if you are only going to produce a small amount of cars.
- simonbarker87 9y agoAbsolutely not true. The Nissan Sunderland plant (which produces over 500K cars per year on two lines) produces both the Nissan Leaf and Infiniti Q30 in low volume on line two (might be line 1, not certain now). The Q30 was introduced from a slow ramp up without stopping production of the line around 18 months ago and is a low volume car.
- mynameisvlad 9y agoIt cost $375 million to retrofit the plant to support building the Q30: http://infinitinews.com/en-US/infiniti/usa/releases/infiniti-q30-officially-starts-production-in-sunderland-uk http://infinitinews.com/en-US/infiniti/usa/releases/infiniti... That's in line with what the parent comment said; it's not cheap at all do add a new vehicle to an existing assembly line, and it's not worth it for low volume production. Infinity also sold over 25 thousand Q(X)30s in 2017, so it's not as low volume as talked about in previous comments, either.
- rcxdude 9y agoAs an interesting tidbit on this point, the reason robotics is favored by car manufacturers in production plants is not because it's cheaper (it's actually more expensive), but because it's more flexible, i.e. changing a line to manufacture a new line is cheaper. This runs counter to most people's intuition of robotics.