There is blasphemy in this thread. The Rolls does not break down. It merely fails to proceed.
[nitpick] Quality is not why car makers use robots. The reasons robots are so prevalent is a cost issue. You buy one robot once, and it can do a task for a million cars with only needing some maintenance and power. No wages, no union dues, no days off, no sick days, no overtime, no hangovers. It all boils down to how you make a million dollars in the car business. Save a buck a car and build a million of them. Quality can be a side benefit of using robots. However GIGO applies here. If the robot is programmed wrong, or does not get the requisite maintenance, your results will be FUBAR.[/nitpick]
I’m remembering an old Peanuts storyline in which Charlie Brown has been telling Linus about the new car his dad bought. He related the fact that there was a lever under the dashboard, the purpose of which Mr. Brown could not determine. In the last strip of the storyline, CB tells Linus, “My dad finally figured out what that lever under the dashboard was for. It was one more thing to go wrong.”
To add on to Rick’s comments (excellent as always) I’ll describe how robots are used to build cars. Keep in mind that there’s all kinds of other automation that’s used, too, but aren’t called robots.
First off, you have the body-in-grey, i.e., the sheetmetal (you may have heard body-in-white; grey is with the doors and others closures including fenders and such). I have a lot of installations in my field that are both robotic and manual (hand-built). Robots always win, hands down. They go to the exact spot that they need to every single time. When you have some Joe with a manual welder, the welds end up in close approximation to engineering intent, but rarely exactly where they’re supposed to be. Of course, a robot is faster, and is more flexible for multiple metal thicknesses than a single operator.
Next comes paint. Robots again do the same thing over and over and over. They won’t dwell in a spot while they scratch their ass, causing paint to drip and run. They’re faster and much more consistent.
In final assembly areas, most cars are still amazingly “hand built.” There may be robots for placing glass, but for the most part final assembly is completely done by hand (assisted with other automation, of course). The difference from “hand-built” in the RR sense is that the car goes down the line to different operators who specialize in a single task, and are able to ensure quality. In RR, you bring most of the parts to the car, and there’s no specialization. With experienced people in both cases, there’s probably little difference, although my gut tells me to trust the single purpose guy more than the multipurpose guy (just a feeling with no basis, though).
The parts all come from some place. Engines use a little bit of robotics, but most precision tooling – while completely automated – isn’t what you’d call a robot. What about the other parts? Are all of the parts that constitute a Rolls hand-built? I think we’ve arrived at a point that we probably don’t know what hand-built even is! “No robots” <> “hand-built”.
[hijack] I have gotten to visit our car plants five or six times. If you are any kind of gear head at all, and like cars or mechanical stuff even a little bit, you should try and tour a auto factory.
IIRC correctly about five years ago, the Japanese were spending about 18-20 man hours to build one car. Volvo was taking about 25 man hours for one of our cars. The engineers were looking for ways to cut at least 2 man hours off our build time. To give you a comparison in the 1960’s cars took about 65 man hours to build.
Volvo is a very small car company, but our factory is the biggest damn building I have ever seen. The building is so big they ride bicycles to get places because it is too far to walk.
Anyway at one end of the building they take rolls of steel and stamp body parts out. A couple of guys pull the finished pieces out, check for damage and stack them. Then comes the welding shop. All of these piles of parts get welded into recognizable parts of cars. When the body is complete doors, hood, and trunk at attached, and the body is sent to paint. I have never been in the paint shop, they don’t allow visitors. 
When the body comes out of the paint shop is on an autonomous robot that drives it to the assembly line. The robot is equipped with sonar, and if something or someone is blocking it path, it stops and waits. After a bit, the robot get impatient and beeps to get them to move! 
As soon as the car is put on the line the fist thing that happens is the doors come off. The go off to their own assembly line to be built.
The car then progresses down the line at each station parts get added either by machine or by man, or sometimes a combination.
One thing that amazed me is how everything is just in time. When the car arrives at the station (let’s say the front seats) The robot turns and grabs the next seat on the supply fixture. These are the correct seats for that car. :eek: There is no running around going “I need black seats, where are the black seats?” If that car needs black seats they are the next one up. The way this is done, is all the parts for that car were ordered several weeks earlier to be delivered on that day on that fixture, in that order. Think about all the parts in the car, and the amount of interlinked computers it must take to keep that all functioning. (They tell a story around the plant that before computers we once built a 3 door car 2 on one side, 1 on the other. Might be a UL, but then again it might not!)
As the body is being built in another part of the plant all of the under car stuff is being assembled. Engine, trans, subframe, exhaust, fuel tank and lines, rear axle, suspension, and all four wheels.
When the under car stuff is ready the coolest part of the factory is next. The marriage point. The body comes in from above and stops at this station. The machine raises up the entire under car stuff. About 15 power tools raise up and tight their fasteners. The robot retracts, the car moves forward about 30 feet and another 15 or so automatic wrenches put in the balance of the fasteners. Two guys install all the under car stuff in about 90 seconds per car. All they do is when the car is at station 1, the are putting new bolts in the wrenches at station 2, when the car moves forward, the reload station 1. I swear to OG, I could stand and watch that all day.
The other really cool spot to watch is where the fixed glass in installed. There are four robotic arms with suction cups on the end. They swivel around and reach over and grab the next piece of glass for the car that is arriving next down the line. Then then flip the glass over so that the inside of the glass faces up, The arms then move the glass under one of two nozzles that dispense the goo that glues the glass in. The nozzles are fixed in place, and the glass has to move to get the goo in the correct place. The the car pulls up, all four arms swivel and move and all four fixed windows get placed into the car at one time. Vacuum is released, the arms go back for more glass and the line moves. What makes this doubly wild is that we build different model cars on the same line at the same time. The line might be S80 S60 XC90 XC90 XC70 S60. Again all the glass is in the right order, and the robots know just where to move to get the goo in the correct place. Again I could watch this for hours.
The rest of the car get finished, test run and driven out of the door. I could go on a lot longer, but I have hijacked this thread enough[/hijack]
The beauty of robots is consistancy. You know exactly what the robot is going to do. It has nothing to do with anger managment, a hangover, a freak injury or a domestic dispute. Either the robot does what it is designed to do or it doesn’t and the difference is easily identified.
“Handmade” is great in an artistic sense but it can be a horror show in a manufacturing process. “Handmade” inherently demands inspection at every manufacturing step to insure quality. That gets expensive.
You have to ask yourself, when you want to get from point A to point B do you want something that is artistic or something that is produced to very high manufacturing quality standards?
For instance, if I buy a computer, I want a microprocessor that is tested and manufactured to high replicable standards, not something that costs a lot and is a one of a kind because it was handcarved by some guy sitting at a microscope with an etching tool.
If you want a reliable watch that keeps accurate time buy a Casio. If you want to pay a lot for a watch that will be inherently innacurate and may fail you at a critical moment then buy a Rolex.
Why are you bashing Rolex? Rolex is not only accurate, it is chronometer certified, and was the first watchmaker to earn that distinction. They invented the screw-down crown (for making watches waterproof). They invented the Auto Rotor system for self-winding watches, now copied by most others. They use only G-colored (near colorless) diamonds. They hold more than a thousand patents. They produce 800,000 watches a year, and have never produced a watch that didn’t sell. Their resale value is higher than any other Swiss production watch. And because they are owned by two trusts, a sizable portion of their profits go to charities.
Manufacturing, per se, might be better done by robots. But names like Rolls and Rolex aren’t about manufacturing per se. They’re about innovation and design. They’re about human aesthetics and achievement. Such things are meaningful to some people. If you want a watch that will pinch the hairs on your wrist and turn it green while rusting away in the humidity, buy a Casio. If you want a work of art that will hold its value forever, buy a Rolex.
Rick, I gotta ask, were they playing “Powerhouse Medley” in the auto factory during all this? 
That is a great story Rick.
All the better for being recounted by someone who doesn’t embellish the details.
I really don’t believe that “boutique” cars (like RR) can be substantially better that robot-produced high volume cars. RR might offer gorgeous interiors, but if you only assemble a few thousand cars a year, you are bound to have all kinds of quality issues. Take transmissions- say you buy transmissions from GM-your orders are insignificant (compared to what Chevrolet buys). So you get leftovers from the end of a production run. And with hand-welded bodies, chances are that things will sometimes not fit. Add to that the problems of running a small shop, and I doubt that RR ever approached the quality levels of a mass produced car.
If the parts you get were robot machined, what does it matter that they are at the end of a production run? And doesn’t the quality of hand welding depend to a great extent on the skills and expertise of the welder? In any case, the manufacturing process is not as primitive as is being implied in this thread. I mean, it isn’t like a Rolls is built with a hammer and chisel. They do use CNC machines.
I filled up next to a guy in a Rolls once.
I asked him the marque, as I couldn’t make it out from my angle.
“It’s a Rolls, and no, I didn’t steal it.”
The conversation progressed, and he related that while Bentley motor cars are reliable, the Rolls Royce is not.
He mentioned a class action suit against the company.
So, I’m probably not choosing one for reliability… give me a Lexus for that.
PS- You guys mentioned the Italian supercars.
One of the guys who used to come in to a store I worked in owned some high-end cars. When I asked him about Ferrari, he related that they were great fun, but “You have to get them tuned up it seems like every 1500 miles or they act up. It’s kind of strange, and the tune-ups are expensive.”
A Bentley is a Rolls, just as a Corvette is a Chevrolet. The mindset about how expensive these cars are to maintain is misplaced. Of course high performance cars require high performance maintainence to keep them high performance. That’s not a negative unless you can’t afford it. And if the guy couldn’t afford it, he shouldn’t have bought it.
And speaking of Bentley, their sort of craftsmanship is typical of such cars:
Every single component of a Bentley is filed on computer in minute detail and can be tracked back through each stage of its development
Veneers are both book and mirror matched to create perfect symmetry either side of a Bentley’s centreline
Every piece of glass in a Bentley is given its final polish with finely powdered pumice normally used to polish optical lenses
Lacquer-spraying robots in the Paint Shop are programmed to simulate a human sprayer on his best day
Steering wheels are doubled stitched by hand using two needles simultaneously; the process is far too complicated for a machine. It takes 15 hours work to create one steering wheel
A full set of leather for a Bentley is selected and cut at the same time, so that there is as little variation in texture as possiblehttp://www.bentleymotors.com/Corporate/display.aspx?websiteid=2&langid=2&cpflgs=1111&infid=356
A person ought to know that such a thing is going to be more expensive to own than a Saturn Ion. If you have an original Picasso in your living room, you’re going to pay whatever it takes to keep it cleaned and protected. If all you have is a Kincaide print, then you just replace it when the kids throw kechup on it. It would be ludicrous for the Picasso owner to complain that it costs him more to keep a Picasso than if he’d bought a Kincaide.
Not since 2002, amigo. Bentley is a division of VW now, Rolls of BMW.
Well, in my experience, the transmission factory will ship reworked line rejects at the end of a run. That means that Rolls will get transmissions that are “not quite” the best. The really funny thing: RR was using GM “Hydramatic” transmissions for years-Rolls took one apart and reworked it-they re-machined some clutch facings (they surface finish was “too rough”. After re-assembly, the tranny wouldn’t shift! (The surface roughness was a vital part of the clutch’s operation-the dumb RR engineers didn’t understand it!)
“The dumb RR engineers”? Obviously a frivolous characterization. All these anecdotes and irrational slams against the world’s highest quality products belong more in IMHO than in GQ. And no, I’m not junior modding; I’m stating a fact.
I demand a cite for “highest quality products” as applied to this particular product.
Depends on how you define quality, right? Well made or full of plush stuff? I’d agree that a Rolls Royce is a quality car, but not in the manufacturing sense (in which I don’t know enough to have an opinion). Take a Lincoln MKX versus a Ford Edge – they both share the same build quality, i.e., the quality’s the same, but there are a lot of people that think that quality is merely synonymous for “extra touches.”
Cite?