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Car Manufacturing Process Overview [video]
- grecy 3y agoIt will be fascinating to see how much this changes after Tesla put their next-gen vehicle into mass production. They talked the big talk at Investor Day this year, and Elon said it again this past week that "The revolution in manufacturing that will be represented by that car will blow people's minds". [1] I'm cautiously optimistic. The more we learn about Cybertruck, the more we learn they're seriously moving the yardstick forward. [1] https://fortune.com/2023/12/06/elon-musk-tesla-sandy-munro-cybertruck-texas/ https://fortune.com/2023/12/06/elon-musk-tesla-sandy-munro-c...
- hasoleju 3y agoI work with a big supplier for the conveyors and stuff that moves the vehicle bodies through the plant. The talk you mentioned really impacts them. They are thinking a lot about the new functionalities they need to develop in their products in order to fulfill the Tesla requirements. Not only does Tesla want to change the car body structure itself, they also want to reduce the cycle time per manufacturing step significantly. This causes the conveyor suppliers to develop completely new concepts for moving the car bodies through the factory.
- grecy 3y agoAbsolutely. From the Munro interview it sounds like Tesla currently have one Model Y coming off the line every 42 seconds, and they're aiming to halve that. From what was said, the second best in the industry right now is about one vehicle every 60 seconds. Elon has said many times that just like Starship and Raptor, the product itself is not nearly as revolutionary (or difficult) as the production system to produce it at scale and speed.
- u320 3y agoHe said that about the Model 3 as well. Turned out he was wrong, as any automotive manufacturing engineer would have told him.
- mgoetzke 3y agoThey are quite fast now, and i would surmise more experienced, and he did say he was wrong trying to automate all way too quickly.
- tibbydudeza 3y agoA single pressed body does not seem a good idea for body repairs. Insurance rates are already high enough = car payment.
- senectus1 3y agonot to mention it wont get approval for driving on many roads around the world (so far) like Australia. due to the danger it poses to whatever it hits.
- vardump 3y agoIt could be horrible or it could be great for repairability. All depends on how that single pressed body is designed.
- tibbydudeza 3y agoI have seen some Indian panelbeaters do miracles on a wrecked car - cutting away a not only a rear quarter panel but half of a floorplan (FWD) but welding a replacement in sutu and then using a chassis jig to pull to straight again. Don't think it will work on your CyberTruck - Tesla repairs are astronomical in normal fender benders.
- hef19898 3y agoWhat you describe might work in the developing world. In the induszrialized west, such a repair makes a car not road worthy.
- HeyLaughingBoy 3y agoI've seen a lot of those videos on TikTok and had the same thought. No way would I get into one of those cars.
- rootcage 3y agoI'm always surprised by the amount of human labor involved, I tend to think of manufacturing as mostly robots but there are numerous manual steps.
- arlcode 3y agoI was surprised to learn that the production of stamping tools, used to shape panels from sheet stock, involves lots of manual passes to bring them to the quality and finish required by car manufacturers. After machine milling them roughly to spec there are employees that angle grind, sandpaper and polish every critical surface of these 10 ton chunks of metal.
- masto 3y agoThe one that really surprised me for some reason was PCB manufacturing. The Strange Parts YouTube channel has a few tours of Chinese factories, and I guess I pictured that it's just some sort of giant clean room with a long conveyor belt that goes through all the processes on its own. So I was not expecting it to start with grabbing a blank PCB from a pile stored outside and taking a band saw to it. Such a mix of high-tech automation and human hands picking things up, racking them on the table, and sticking them into the next machine.
- dfox 3y agoThe board level electronics assembly is mostly an solved problem that can be automated perfectly fine, but when you get to through-hole almost nobody does it, because (a) the THT capable pick and place machines are uncummon and thus somewhat expensive (b) it often requires more expensive parts that are compatible with such machines (better geometry tolerances, surfaces for the machine to pick them...) and finally (c) the NRE costs of getting that to work. That said, then there are niches where the automated THT assembly apparently makes sense and all the NRE costs seem to be offset by lower per-unit costs of the PCB material itself. Prime example is mid-range to high-end home AV equipment (Japanese branded if not made in Japan outright), where the large mostly empty single-sided FR-2 boards with truly ridiculous amounts of obviously machine populated wire-links and discrete THT radial components are particularly striking.
- nliang86 3y agohttps://www.videogist.co/videos/car-manufacturing-process-overview-1675 https://www.videogist.co/videos/car-manufacturing-process-ov...
- albert_e 3y agoThis looks like a perfect video example for this type of summarization!
- dartharva 3y agoThe assembly and inspection stages involve surprisingly more manual labor than I had imagined.
- Animats 3y agoYes. Interesting that they don't show engine manufacturing at all. That's been automated since the early 1950s.
- londons_explore 3y agoCars are made in smaller volumes than most people imagine. Compare to toilet paper production... Your family perhaps consumes 100 rolls of toilet paper per year, and perhaps 0.1 cars per year (typical lifetime of a car is ~20 years). So there is 1000x the benefit to any time saving by automation on the toilet paper production line than on the car production line.
- foobarian 3y agoSpeaking of inspection, I was actually wondering what they do with rejected units. It would seem hard to fix problems once the car is already assembled, so do they just trash them?
- csours 3y agoThis video does a very poor job of explaining the quality process. Inspection happens at multiple points throughout assembly, and most problems are caught before end of line testing. There are metrics on this and it's common to shoot for 98%+ of defects to be caught in process. There are only a few problems that would lead to a scrap job - for instance if the body of the car is damaged to the point that they would have to cut and weld new panels, that vehicle would be scrapped. But even for scrapped vehicles, all of the components are removed to re-build that vehicle. Basically anything besides serious body damage can be repaired. But you are correct that it is hard to fix problems. Most parts are added in one minute or less - including the engine assembly! But it takes much, much longer than one minute to remove an engine.
- b10nic 3y ago
- Animats 3y agoIf you've never seen it, watch "Master Hands".[1] This is a very good movie of auto manufacturing in the 1930s. Those workers went on strike a few years after that, in 1939, and won. That ended the "Chrysler Speed Up Initiative". [1] https://archive.org/details/masterhandscomplete4kh264 https://archive.org/details/masterhandscomplete4kh264
- w-m 3y agoI went in with an expectation of it being completely different. And there is much more manual labor in 1939. It's dirtier, and grittier, but mostly for the steps we don't see in the Toyota video, as for example the motor comes in one block, and we don't see how it's built. But on a high level, both videos look like the same process. You can find many steps, like the stamping, the welding, the final assembly, that look nearly unchanged in 85 years, save for some automation with robots, and some quality-of-life improvements in the assembly, where people don't have to lug around heavy parts.
- albert_e 3y agoIs there a similar overview of the DESIGN process for new/modified versions of cars ... before they hit full scale production? Thanks!
- leoedin 3y agoIf you like this, there's an excellent 30 minute video following the Dacia Duster production line - https://youtu.be/32eWkuIHLoE?si=T-gud6AG1PCD1gep https://youtu.be/32eWkuIHLoE?si=T-gud6AG1PCD1gep It's much more relaxed, with little commentary - and really shows every step. Having done some very rudimentary work around manufacturing and testing, it's pretty incredible to see how much work - jigs, robot programming, test software etc - goes into the manufacturing machine.
- javiramos 3y agoExcellent video of the BMW i3 production line: https://youtu.be/pa5_tudyAF8 https://youtu.be/pa5_tudyAF8?
- sbierwagen 3y ago@5:27 Note the strange welded-aluminum frame the worker sets into the battery box. That's because the i3's battery is cooled by the AC system! What a tragic car. Discontinued in 2021. The material costs of carbon fiber are dirt cheap, so in theory it ought to beat aluminum for car structure. But once you get away from simple tubes, which can be fully automated, layup ends up being most of your costs. (Not helped by the fact that i3 carbon parts were made on the opposite side the of the planet and shipped to Germany) BMW's business case for the car had to be "once we make enough of them, costs will come down", but that never happened.
- hef19898 3y agoCarbon fibre is cheap-ish tp buy. Carbon fibre parts are the opposite of cheap so, especially load bearing and safety critical parts with complex geometries, those are quite expensive. The i3 was an interesting car so, and BMW for some reason fumbled the head start the car got them.
- loudmax 3y agoInteresting that they attach doors, then remove them, then put them back on again. It raises the question, why did they bother to attach them the first time around? My guess is that the answer is the paint process. There's some range of allowable difference in paint hue going from one car to the next, even if they're marketed as having the same color. That range is much smaller for a given single vehicle. If the doors are even a slightly different hue, you're likely to notice.
- edpichler 3y agoThey paint it all together to have exactly the same color (as you well said) and avoid two painting jobs in different parts of the process. There are fewer moving parts this way, following the lean manufacturing principles. Then it is temporarily removed to create more space for the workers (as the video shows).
- hef19898 3y agoAnd the doors move in a parallel line for assembly of the door. Making it easy to maintain a one peace flow and not worry about the various options for each car on the line. And, as already pointed out, a homogenous paint job.
- dfox 3y agoOne thing to note is that usually most of the door itself is usually manufactured by some external supplier and the parallel assembly line in the final assembly only mates a subassembly that contains all the complexity of the door (interior paneling, speakers, buttons, DCU, airbags, locking mechanism...) to the outer door body panel. The space of the options for that "door module" is large enough that it usually gets ordered from the manufacturer some time after the car body gets assigned to particular order (near the start of the painting step) and these modules have to reach the final assembly line in particular time and in particular order. All is well when the whole manufacturing and logistics chain works in the same order that the car orders entered the production. But in practice there is a lot of things that can cause the ordering to become desynchronized, which leads to interesting logistical challenges (especially because if there is a need to do something out of order the order discontinuity is essentially never neatly aligned to size of the containers that the subassemblies are stored and transported in). The same thing also applies to other subassemblies that have large option spaces, but probably the only other thing with somewhat huge option space that is not manufactured directly by the automaker are completed dashboard modules. Also, in the traditional approach the rolling chasis and the body tend to be manufactured by separate assembly lines and then "married toggether" pretty late in the whole process. But this is usually done in the same plant, so there is less of an possibility of things getting desynchronized.
- edpichler 3y agoA beautiful complex machine can be built at such a low cost. Manufacturing is fascinating.
- 38529977thrw 3y agoInterested in an informed comment on the paint application part. How do they keep those spray rooms clean from paint? I noticed the robots were covered up to protect against the spray but the floor was pristine.
- b10nic 3y agoThe floor is open grating above a pool of water that is pumped to reclaim the solids. Further the paint is electrostatically charged as it comes off the bell applicator so it is attracted to the body like a balloon to the wall.
- 38529977thrw 3y agoThanks. Was wondering about electrostatic myself. Still wondering how the grate itself doesn't get stained due to the air flow.
- csours 3y agoA few nitpicks - I know this video is just an overview, so these don't matter all that much, but: - The paint doesn't "dry" per se, it is baked on. Usually at least twice - once for primer, once for mid, top and clear coat. Sometimes more than twice - 1 prime, 2 mid, 3 top and clear. - Clear Coat is incredibly important for surface finish durability, it's not just for appearance - Quality is baked in at the process level, not just inspected at the end of the process. - Everything is much more complicated than portrayed, and there's way more going on, but it is only a 5 minute video after all.