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The assembly and inspection stages involve surprisingly more manual labor than I had imagined.
by dartharva 3y ago
The 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 agoAt least some of the rejects are crash tested.