After the American Century
As part of the research for my forthcoming book on the assembly line (MIT Press, 2013), I have visited several factories. Here is my account of a visit to one of them.
It costs €8 to see the BMW plant in Munich, and it is
necessary to sign up in advance. There is room for only two groups of 25 people each hour, one with an English
guide. In contrast, the magnificent show room where the tours start, a vast
building called “BMW Welt,” attracts much larger crowds. It is a temple where
enthusiasts can see all the latest models, pose in the driver’s seat, look at
exhibits about how (and of what materials) the car is made, sit on a BMW
motorcycle, or go into the gift shop to purchase BMW T-shirts, mugs, jackets,
key-chains, model cars, and much more. In the bookstore on the mezzanine level
they can also buy books about automobiles, design, and the company history. The
building is about consumption and pride of ownership. Its sinuous lines and the
profusion of displays create the feeling that one is in a high-end shopping
complex. A distinguished stream of customers constantly arrives, to be welcomed
and ushered into elevators to higher
floors inaccessible to ordinary visitors. Most BMW buyers enjoy a fine lounge
and restaurant where they await the arrival of their new car. A select few go
to a more exclusive redoubt of luxury, so rarified that most of those who serve
the thronging clientele have never seen it. Most tourists are not buyers. But
if they ascend to the second level, seven meters about the ground floor, they can
look across at the exclusive area where immaculate cars are driven in and
delivered to new owners, who drive down a ramp that circles out into the city
traffic.
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| BMW Welt |
The factory tour lasted two hours and
covered three kilometers. Most of the time we walked on concrete floors and
metal bridges, surfaces that punish the arches, the knees and the lower back.
Fifty years ago such a factory tour would have been noisier and grittier, and
one would have sympathized with the workers caught up in that environment every
day. But today robots do much of the work. Looking a bit like giant orange
insects, they move deliberately, pausing with some delicacy near the end of
each maneuver, as sensors guide their pincers to just the right position.
First, in the stamping plant they guide sheets of steel into a succession of
enormous machines that crunch down over sheets of flat steel transforming it
into the hood or roof or trunk, or perhaps a left or right door. In each case,
before the die slams down on the smooth steel, the metal is sprayed with a mist
of oil to lubricate the process. The massive first stamping creates the basic
form, which is refined and completed in the smaller stampings that follow, as
ends are trimmed or folded, small holes added, and further indentations made.
In 1913 several workers were needed to feed blanks into stamping machines, take
out the results, and send them on to the next machine. A century later all this
work is done by machines, with only a few people keeping an eye on the process.
Our guide declares this technological unemployment is just as well, for the
work is boring and yet dangerous, given the tremendous force of the stamping
machines. It is endlessly repetitive and also hard on the ears. Some skilled
workers are needed because the dies in the machines must be changed at times to
make spare parts for older models. A model is usually made for seven years, but
after that BMW produces parts for another decade.
The stamped
parts are next transported, automatically, to the body assembly, where the left
and right door frames are attached to the car’s floor. Then a roof is added,
followed by smaller parts and then the doors. In many cases the stamped panels
are first fixed in place with a fast-drying glue that also functions as a thin
elastic layer that will cushion shocks and improve the car’s ride. The metal
parts are then welded together, again by giant orange robots, eight of them
working at once in an almost silent, rapid sequence that has been choreographed
and fine-tuned. Hardly a worker has touched it yet, but the welded parts have
become a car body, still without wheels, windows, seats, or drive train.
Before these can be added, the bodies
pass on to the paint building, where we trudged after our guide over steel
bridges through strange smelling passageways. We had glimpses of machinery at
times, and heard an occasional hiss or gurgling sound, until we emerged into a
large white room with soft seats where we gladly sat for a five-minute lecture
on the steps involved in painting a car. One might imagine that the process was
like painting the outside of a house, with a primer and one or two coats of
good paint, and indeed that is exactly what Ford did in 1913. Each coat then needed hours to dry
before the next one was applied. But it
was hardly so time-consuming in 2011, even though there are more layers. First,
all the residual oil and any dirt are zealously washed off the bodies. Then
they are baptized in a thick undercoat, through a total immersion of the whole
body in a large pool of paint, which is then pulled up by a robot to drip off
before passing through a heating shed, where it is first baked in infrared heat
at 150 degrees C, driving off all the liquid in the paint, and then furiously
blown over by artificial winds.
This is just the beginning, as four more layers
will be applied, including one that is a bit rubbery, to make the surface more
resistant to flying gravel or hailstones. The next to last layers are the paint
proper that give the car its distinctive color. Ninety percent of all BMW
buyers want their vehicle to be black, silver, or white. The other eleven
colors are seldom used. New avatars of the same orange robots, made in Augsburg
just an hour away from the plant, apply these layers. They spray the paint
evenly, and digital cameras record the results. During each new round of
coatings the car is given an electrical charge that attracts the tiny droplets
to its surface. Not much paint sails wide of the mark, but any waste falls into
a continuously rushing stream, a mini-Niagara under each painting station. The
paint is extracted from the water, which is reused. Indeed, the water
usage of the BMW plant has been reduced 90 percent in recent decades.
Once the BMW bodies have been
repeatedly painted and baked, they pass into a room with six levels of shelves
on each side where they are carefully stored. In the passageway between the
shelves a machine that is both an elevator and a powerful robot lifts one body
at a time, lowers it to ground level and sends it on its way to the final
assembly plant. More than half of the shelf space is empty, for the factory
makes only cars that have been ordered. It produces each body just in time for
final assembly.
The guide next takes us to the other
great tributary stream to the final assembly, the engine manufacturing plant.
Most of the engines made here are powerful 4 cylinder 2.0 liter affairs that
get 16 kilometers to the liter (or more than 30 mpg). Half the labor that goes
into them is human, half robotic. The V8 engine for larger BMWs is 80% made by
human beings, and the top of the line engine for the Rolls Royce is 100%
man-made. (To be precise, 95% of the workers at the Munich BMW plant are men,
and the few women are clustered in certain jobs.) In the motor plant the guide
does not show us the casting of engine blocks or their precision drilling. Once
the work of extremely skilled labor, this too has been progressively automated.
Already in 1913 Ford had a purpose built machine that simultaneously drilled
forty-five holes in an engine block, from four directions. A
century later, the early stages of engine production have few workers. We see
obviously skilled men building parts into these blocks as they pass down the
line. Inspections also are continuous, until motors are complete and they can
be harnessed to the drive train.
At this point the two streams of work
come together. The bodies meet the engine and drive trains they are destined to
mate with, or “marry” as the workers put it. The bodies gently fall down as the
engines rise up, with a brief pause before the last centimeters of drop and the
two become one. Final assembly can then
begin. This part of automobile production still attracts the most public
attention, as hundreds of parts and pre-assembled units like the dashboard are
put in, typically with no more than a minute for each operation. Painting, by
comparison, is repetitive and not as interesting to watch, and not even shown
on many assembly line tours. Final assembly is much faster. One man unbundles
and lays out a car’s electrical wiring and secures it in position, and a moment
later another worker is covering the wires and the entire bottom of the car
with a perfectly cut felt-like layer. Visitors walk much faster than the
crawling line, and to them each task seems to take considerably less than a
minute. One man with the help of a robot lifts and puts in the dashboard. The
back and front seats, the emergency brake, the headlights and many small
details are quickly and expertly installed. The windshield goes in. In half an
hour one has traversed much of the line, and the cars are nearing completion.
The doors, earlier removed to allow easier access to the interior, are
reinstalled. At the end of the line some gasoline is pumped in, and each car is
started, tested, and driven out of the factory.
The
BMW tour in Munich is by no means unusual. The industrial tourist can visit
similar factories in all parts of the world. The newest are often designed as
tourist sites. Visitors have been
coming to see such marvels of assembly since Ford's managers first created the
line in 1913. For a century, the public has remained enchanted. When I visited
BMW the tours were sold out, but the factory's
“romance of production” was less central to the public than the “romance
of consumption” in the showroom. In both places the car was treated as an
almost enchanted “thing in itself,” an icon of modernity. For many it has
become the ultimate consumer product, especially because now the assembly line
can produce individualized automobiles, made to the consumer’s specifications.
Henry Ford made his cars identical. But today, using the computer to keep track
of the entire process from ordering to delivery, the assembly line produces
individualized objects. Paradoxically, an assembly line with many robots and
far fewer workers than in 1913 makes a more highly differentiated line of
automobiles.
