14 Apr
2003
14 Apr
'03
7:29 a.m.
With
the computerization of manufacturing that's available, it makes no
sense to me why auto manufacturers can't stamp out any body part, for
any car, from any year, on demand. Of course, I guess the reason they
don't do this is called "planned obsolesence."
You may want to ask someone in the industry why they can not do this,
even with the computization of manufacturing. You will be horrified.
The auto plants themselves are extremely finely tuned machines - straying
from the optimal cost the manufacturers an extreme
amount of money. Back
in my USR days, I worked with a guy that mas a manufacturing
engineer for
GM. Whenever something went wrong and the assembly line stopped (it was a
final line), it would cost GM around $30,000 per minute. That's 1.8
million dollars an hour. Pretty serious. Even at USR, when our lines
stopped, the cost was something around $150 per minute.
Having a line that stamps out older body parts on demand just would not
make sense. Even if all of the tooling was still available (it is not,
and you *really* don't want to know how much new tooling would cost), the
manufacturing engineers could not make a line that even comes close to
making money.
They also can not stamp hundreds of panels at a time and store them -
warehousing is extremely expensive, and body panels are about the most
innefficient things ever made to store (next time or two you see a
freight train, look for those monster sized boxcars. They are shipping
body panels. They have to be huge, as they are moving a bunch of air,
with some metal scattered in between.).
William Donzelli
aw288(a)osfn.org