Are all car manufactures this advanced?.......

 

Amazing. Thanks for the post Tedd.

 

Hi Tedd, I worked for a company (Prodomax) who build these lines. We built for Toyota, Jeep, Ford, Honda and GM and many aftermarket suppliers. These robots running at full speed are quite fast moving from point A to point B. The best is when the techs are setting them up and it is like a boxing match, clearance is everything.
Steve

 

Don't know about 'all', but many are, or have been, to varying degrees.

I've been on several different lines, but nothing as clean/advanced as that.

20 years ago I was at a GM Truck stamping plant and they had robots, auto carts, etc. I was in the pickup truck bed side stamping area. Cart would come in with blanks, big robot would whip sheet into press, press stamped, another big robot whipped out panel and stacked on another cart. When cart was full , off it went. What struck me was how fast the process was. I'm sure it's even faster & more precise now. You wouldn't want to get close to the robots. They'd shred you with a bed side and probably not miss a beat.

I also spent time in the Subaru plant in Lafayette, IN. They build the whole car body from scratch there starting with coils of steel. The body welding stations were bizarre to watch from the catwalk above. There were heavy orange/brown translucent curtains around the stations to shield human eyes from the welding. You would see the robots all moving around silhouetted by the welding. Looked like some freaky prehistoric battle going on in there.

My bro in-law is an senior engineer for one of the big automation suppliers. He tells me about achievements like whipping a 300 lb truck trans around at 90 degrees/sec and positioning it within something like .05" or linear motors that can move heavy stuff fast and can stop/position within tiny tolerances. They're getting bigger, faster, & more precise all the time.

Skynet. It's only a matter of time.

 

I'll point out that Tesla still hasn't actually made a profit...

 

Very true... unlike other manufacturers, Elon plows everything back into research and development, something some other manufacturers might consider (insert Volkswagen, GM, etc,)

 

Don't believe all the hype. My experience is with SpaceX, but it's pretty much the same story. Price has no relationship to cost. He understands that he needs to buy into the business to get established, but the more you invest, the more future sales need to pay back this investment. If the sales don't take off as anticipated, the financial hole just keeps getting deeper.

How'd that work out for Solyndra?

 

I'm not sure Solyndra was ever a real long-term business.

Their technology wasn't as revolutionary or productive as they wanted people to believe. Their panels were marginally more efficient but seemed cost effective if you believed their hype and considered the price of the competition. Once the competition dropped in price, they were toast.

They seemed more like these pipe dream companies whose real business plan is convincing people to invest huge amounts of capital and get gov't backed loans as opposed to actually producing/profiting. Scrape a few Mil off the top for a few years, fold it up & start another.

We've seen similar companies locally here like Carbon Motors, LiTEBOX , etc. Wacky plans & huge gov't loan requests. (Although, thanks to Solyndra, scrutiny was much higher & they were denied)

Oh well, Solyndra's failure just meant Tesla probably got a really good deal when they bought the old Solyndra plant building last year !

 

Interesting video. That plant is very clean, and very slow. High production plants would not be able to get away with some of those choices. The video showed stamping, weld, paint, and a little of assembly.

In stamping, the presses and press robots are similar to Toyota, and the only real difference I saw was that the blanker, which is the thing cutting like a cookie cutter making a blank, which then gets stamped, is that they use a laser, which is cool and flexible, but slow, compared to our specific blanking dies, or oscillating cutter. I spent a year in stamping so I know some of it.

In weld, there were the same conveyors, arc welders, spot welders, and material handling robots of a modern line. I know a little weld, and didn't see much difference except it's clean. In paint, the ED dip and the paint robots looked similar, but I really don't know paint at all.

In assembly, their lines appear to be made of AGVs where our modern lines are friction drive trolleys. Their engine and rear suspension lifters are also AGVs, whereas ours are manual load via dollies. We install seats by pneumatic assist, not robot, and our glass is also installed by assist, not robot, although our urethane is applied by robots.

On the other hand, they had a lot of people towing cars around, handling panels by hand, and doing manual things, which a high production plant has not the time to do. Their plant is very clean, and very pretty, and it's obvious they take a lot of pride in what they do. I actually got a couple ideas to implement off of watching that video. A lot of their stuff won't work for me, as we go too fast, but it's neat to spitball ideas.

 

This is very true. Musk thinks like an inventor. He tries to land a booster stage rocket under power, on a barge, which is very inefficient, and takes fuel and computers. NASA let the thing parachute into the ocean and they then recover it. Refurb costs less than time and parts needed to make the intelligent SpaceX booster.

And people don't get that. Everyone thinks Musk is awesome because he did something NASA didn't, and it's only because there was no point in doing it. Considering what they've done at Canaveral, and that they did it close to fifty freaking years ago, SpaceX has got a long way to go to impress me.

The biggest thing keeping NASA away from Mars is that we keep pissing money out of the first world and into the third world, instead of into space, but that's getting into politics.