What is an American car?<\/p>\n
<\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>This video takes you through the build process of the BMW Z4 sports convertible.<\/p>\n<p>The reason I moved to Lansing Michigan in 1983 was to replace Oldsmobile’s IBM computer software with software that ran on Tandem. Telling several thousand union workers to go home for the day because the IBM crashed again – and totally screwing up your “just in time” supply chain gets very expensive very fast. My main contribution was writing the programs that printed the pieces of paper that travel with the cars and subassemblies telling people on the line what to do as each car goes past. Robotic assembly was still a couple years away.<\/p>\n<p>A few metrics to notice – this plant produces about 500 other cars and 100 of these sports cars a day – employing around 4,400 workers. That means around 8 hours of labor per car to assemble the car – not including the labor in Munich to build the engine, the labor at Lear to make the seats, etc. Low non-union labor costs in South Carolina is why they built this plant – as the video points out, many of the cars built in South Carolina are exported back to Europe.<\/p>\n<p>Compare and contrast with this almost identical video of the factory in Brampton Ontario, where the Dodge Challenger is built<\/p>\n<p>http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=WiVMvV_d1eY<\/p>\n<p>This factory was built in the 1980s by American Motors. My friend from Chicago worked at this plant putting in Tandem software with very sophisticated robotic assembly operations. At the time, I was doing consulting work just as Chrysler “took over” AMC. They were stunned – that little company that built the Javelin , Gremlim, Pacer and Hornet (and their joint venture with Renault) had a brand new assembly plant that was a decade ahead of the best plant Chrysler had. Chrysler felt they needed to have a consistent assembly plant operation – they could either upgrade the old Chrysler plants to bring them up to AMC’s technology or they could rip out the robots and turn their brand new assembly plant into a 1950 era assembly plant. Care to guess what they decided?<\/p>\n<p>I could go on and on about all the nuances of the technology and the people in these two videos. Both the Olds plant in Lansing and Buick City in Flint are now just holes in the ground. (a brand new much smaller plant was built in Lansing, the one in Flint is an empty lot)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>What is an American car? This video takes you through the build process of the BMW Z4 sports convertible. The reason I moved to Lansing Michigan in 1983 was to replace Oldsmobile’s IBM computer software with software that ran on … <a href=\"https:\/\/streamingradioguide.com\/startingover\/?p=9602\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">→<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[108],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9602","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-collapse-of-america"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/streamingradioguide.com\/startingover\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9602","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/streamingradioguide.com\/startingover\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/streamingradioguide.com\/startingover\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/streamingradioguide.com\/startingover\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/streamingradioguide.com\/startingover\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9602"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/streamingradioguide.com\/startingover\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9602\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9606,"href":"https:\/\/streamingradioguide.com\/startingover\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9602\/revisions\/9606"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/streamingradioguide.com\/startingover\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9602"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/streamingradioguide.com\/startingover\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9602"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/streamingradioguide.com\/startingover\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9602"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}