Science Forums 2

[CraigD]

Disclaimer: my personal experience in the car manufacturing industry is slight, consisting of work in a replacement car parts warehouse, driving a truck between suppliers’ warehouses and ours and from ours to parts stores, writing software for a similar auto parts distributing company, and, second had, having lived with a former Ford assembly line worker. I’m far from expert.

Originally Posted by GAHD

Bit of a nitpick here, but this stops them from taking over the chassis-creation (automated CNC) divisions how?

A company of 20 people can’t begin doing the jobs of tens of thousands of people, even if trained to do them, because there are simply too few people in it. Even if some part of the whole vehicle manufacturing process, such chassis or body fabricating (hardly any present day passenger car has a chassis, but has instead a unibody, or Monocoque), is so highly automated that only a few people are needed to operate it, other steps, such as assembly, still use human workers. Compared to systems such as automate bottling and food packaging, most car manufacturing remains very hands-on.

If a large car company crashes and burns, whoever picks up the pieces will likely need to employ many of the dead company’s employees at the same factories and offices to do nearly the same jobs as before. Though new senior leaders can change a lot about a company, even following a takeover, companies retain much of their previous identity.

Originally Posted by GAHD

This stops them from wiping out the gas-engine works depts (including drivetrain, exaust, and other associatedsystems they hav e 'experience' removing), how?

The consensus among industry experts appears to me to be that, even if the success of battery electric-only cars in the market place meets the most optimistic reasonable expectations, there remain applications that they simply can’t perform, such as traveling distances longer than a few hundred miles with only brief rest and refueling stops.

I think that emerging battery technology like Altair’s Lithium-titanate battery will prove this belief wrong, and that all ground vehicles (I’ve yet to see a convincing case for the feasibility of electric aircraft) can be powered by electric batteries. I think your vision of wiping out gas engine manufacturing, GAHD, is much less far-fetched than most experts believe.

We’re prudent, however, to keep in mind that these new battery technologies are not quite proven. Until I’ve actually seen them – they will likely appear first in new laptop computer – I’ll remain wary that they may not work as well as claimed, or may be prohibitively expensive or difficult to manufacture in sufficient numbers and size.

Originally Posted by GAHD

No I mean a complete removal of anyone who doesn't twist a wrench; phasing out high-level management first, followed by and extensive downsizing of 'middle management' untill the company has a more direct communication line between the 'floor' and the 'office' hopefully with with the various 'lead hand' or 'floor senior' workers taking up more pf the papertrail(or eliminating some of it)

I don’t doubt that carmakers suffer from the same “too many chiefs, not enough Indians” problem as many other large enterprises. However, I think you might be surprised at the importance of many jobs that don’t involve actually twisting a wrench on a production line.

One kind of job that’s obviously very important is design.

Management/clerical is also more important than one might think. Components and subassemblies of most vehicles are made at many places by many different companies. Tracking and managing this can be as critical to successful production as actual hands-on work.