The common perception is that cars are getting engineered to be more fuel efficient and the safety standards are always increasing, but it's my opinion that manufacturing processes in America are being driven by material providers and modular equipment assembly. How did I come to this conclusion? Well if you care to ask then maybe you have a few minutes to listen to me describe the difference between American made cars and their foreign competitors.
First let me explain modular equipment assembly because it is a pretty fascinating process where the computerized robot assembles a vehicle on a production line. When you think about a production line, you visualize the common robot arm like in the movie Iron Man where there is a lot of sparks flying and the robot makes all these previous calculated moves and welds the car together, but the truth is that is only one part of the process.
Yes there is a robot that does the welding like in Iron Man, actually there are probably thousands of them doing the welding in a manufacture plant then the skeleton bodies are shipped next door to another assembly site where they put the hoods and the doors on, but let's not get ahead of ourselves. It all begins with steel.
In the old days, steel made up the frame of the car and molded body panels were stamped out of steel like in the movie 8 mile where Detroit based rapper Enimen worked for like a second on a hood stamping machine, but let's face it most parts today are plastic, so the only steel you find is in the parts underneath the plastic and a lot of those parts are either cast aluminum\steel hybrids or some other material because it's cheaper.
That brings me to the notion that American economy and vehicle manufacturing are intricately linked by the very fact that cars aren't made 100% of steel anymore. when you think of Detroit as the capitol of the big three companies of GM, Ford and Chrysler your really mistaking cars for steel mills. Back in World War I and II the government ordered all the steel mills to give their steel to companies to make tanks and airplanes as well as military vehicles, so the American car manufacturer was really just an after thought of gutting foreign made product like in Germany and Japan because we devastated them in war.
So, the American car companies have always been an arm of the government and are technically a part of a socialist program just in case you ever believed that we would let Detroit go bankrupt or believe the politician claim that they saved them from bankruptcy because that was never going to happen just like too big to fail banks and financial brokers because our government is as much in dept to them as they are to us.
Anyway, my point is that foreign manufactures had to rebuild after wars and when they did they looked at their manufacturing processes and adjusted for all steel bodies and other piece meal processes that adjudicated having to make more with less resources.
This in turn made their vehicles smaller and faster which brought the price down and made them a competitive alternative to bigger more expensive American made vehicles. Then in the 70's their was a gas crisis and that to was, excuse the pun, fueled by war and global political strategies which again forced American based companies to follow their foreign competition in manufacturing processes.
To get back to my original point of the American made vehicles being dictated in manufacturing by material providers and equipment assembly known as modular assembly, let me explain a jig which is like a form or a metal plate that hold parts of a car together while it is being assembled. A jig doesn't really need to be just one thing or you don't need many jigs for every part of the car, but it can be a piece of equipment that holds together many parts of the car. Let's say you have a jig for the motor and another for the front end and still another jig for the transmission and so and and so forth... This is what is meant by a modular assembly because you don't have to go back to the drawing bored and I can't help myself, to "Redesign the Wheel," but when you want to change the engine from a 8 cylinder to a 6 cylinder you just switch out the jig for the motor and keep on producing cars.
Modular assembly allows the manufacture to produce different models of the same car to give the customer options like 4 track or sport vehicle and the like. It doesn't work so much in cases where you jump from a mid size to a full size or an economy size car or truck though and this is one of the main differences in American car manufacturing and the foreign competitor. Keep in mind, I'm not saying the foreign manufacture doesn't use modular assembly or jigs, but the major difference is the process where they individualize certain parts of the car like the drive train or the motor.
To give an example, a 2015 average American SUV is somewhere around 4k to 5K pounds in gross weight. It has an average of a 8 cylinder 4-5 Liter engine and a 3-4 liter 6 cylinder. In contrast a foreign vehicle usually is smaller and sometimes only comes in a 6 cylinder version. Now before you interrupt and point out that they make Toyota tundra's and Nissan full size vehicles let me explain that they only make those to sell in America.
In America we like things big and the bigger the better right? Well realistically that concept doesn't work to well with cars. It takes more power to push more weight and so they keep having to add more power to the engine which costs more and again adds more weight. You might say, "Well bigger is better because it's safer." I would counter that you should remember that 65% of the vehicle is made of plastic or some really thin metal that is designed to crumble like an aluminum can when it's wrecked, so your safer argument goes literally out the window.
You might say, well "there are seat belt technology and air bags," but again foreign vehicles have that to in fact their probably the one's that came up with the technology because foreign competition has been so intense that to slow importing American regulatory standards have been invented to deter importing and foreign manufactures responded by making systems so good American manufactures copy them.
To drive home the point that American manufacturers really are beholden to suppliers that just want to sell more material instead of bringing down their material prices to where automobile makers would just buy more material and make more cars and trucks, think about this; Most of the parts aren't even assembled in America. No, every major manufacturer has parts assembled in Mexico or Canada for one reason or another. Again, you can argue that it's because union worker wages or regulatory requirements, but the fact is we give cuts and deals to our manufacturers, but they are controlled by stake holders who would rather ship jobs over seas than see their profits go down.
What set off all this recollection of information is the fact that I was reading about how the Chrysler 300 was so big and of course the thought provoking image of "bigger is better," came to mind, but the fact is it isn't true. Bigger doesn't mean better just like lighter doesn't mean faster when you think about the quantity of material were adding to vehicles. The Chrysler 300 is a perfect example of this concept being untrue. I looked at these cars and they do look big, but then I drove one and it reminded me of the midsize sedans of the nineties. It wasn't bigger in interior dimension and therefore comfort. It only looked bigger because of the large quarter panels and the long hood and fenders.
It started my thought process about our perception of American made cars and the recent realization that advertisement and reporting news stories have crossed a line today where as consumers we think were being told a news story, but really it's just advertisement.
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