Wednesday, Mar 01, 2006 at 11:15
SteveM/scottcamp
You are both so right!
When a new car is designed, all prototypes are essentially hand-built. The vehicles bought by customers however are manufactured using automated production processes and assembled by a different and automated process.
Thus it is not simply the vehicle that is different but also the production process.
My experience as a research engineer with GM was that some problems only show up once the production line is running - and may in some cases be introduced by that line. Many such faults do not show up until months after manufacturer and may take further months to fix.
The following is a minor but actual example.
After two years or so production, one Vauxhall car had severe chrome plating problems - where the final chrome coating was lifting almost in one piece from the ultra-thin prior flash coating. This problem affected virtually the entire production of just this one model - but not of others assembled on the same plating production line (which had not been changed in any way for the new model). It also affected only the front bumper - not the back.
I was directly responsible for tracing this problem. The cause was simply that the new front bumper was about 1.5 kg heavier than previously, but lighter than other bumpers also on the line.
This change in weight was the cause.
As this bumper was lowered automatically into the plating vat, it unfortunately bounced about a millimetre before it settled onto the electrified track that carried the plating current. (It was a harmonic resonance effect and that bumper was the exact weight needed to iniate the bounce.)
This resulted in an initial macroscopically thin plating layer(deposited in less than a millisecond) followed by the main but poorly adherering main plating layer. After a time these two layers separated.
There are many such examples - and one of the main functions of the research lab back then at least was to sort out these often esoteric faults.
In short - the initial production vehicles may be part of the development process! It's great that some people buy them, but you won't find me lining up for one.
Collyn Rivers
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