Well today was a typical fall day in Germany -- overcast and dreary. We left Augsburg after a great continental breakfast and headed to Ingolstadt to the Audi Factory. Dave has a beautiful 2006 A4 Audi that is black on black but he is looking to trade up in the future. Having never been in any kind of production plant I was really interested to go so we signed up for the 2 hour english-speaking tour and boy, did I learn a lot. It takes 29 hours to produce one car and 2700 cars are made daily. If you buy an A3 model, you can chose from one of 68 steering wheels and 28 paint colors for any model. They even had pink -- god forbid why anyone would do that to an Audi. 85% of the Audis manufactured are either white, silver, grey or black. I found the robotics fascinating; they were manufactured by Kunk or Kunh or something like that. To watch as they moved metal and/or parts around and do some of the assembling was like poetry in motion. The wire harness for each car is assemble the day of production and if extended out and laid end to end it would be 2-4 kilometers long. The motto on the production line is "one touch; one movement." The workers on the line work for 1-1/2 hours and then take a 12 minute break. We were there during a break and they snack and also have weiss (white or light) bier which I found to be interesting. The four layers of paint of each car is thinner than a human hair. As the cars go through the paint that gives it the final color, the paint automatically changes from one vehicle to the next without any overspray. Our tour guide explained how this happens but it had something to do with electrostatics -- whatever that means and it was a little technical for me. Anyway, as the cars go through the assembly line, there is a RFID placed on the roof of each car. This is a radio frequency ID tag that monitors the assembly of each vehicle down to the color of the headliner and it lessens the chance of a custom ordered vehicle not being correct.
Audi bought Ducati, an Italian motorcycle manufacturer, within the last year and some of the bikes were on display in the museum. I saw a "hottie on a Ducati" in Italy when I was there a few years ago and the bike really is awesome (so was the hottie). The Audi factory in Ingolstadt is a huge campus and employs 35,000 people and has three shifts of workers. The people who order cars and come to pick them up are treated royally -- which they should be considering what they pay for the cars! My little Chevy Cruze is nowhere as fancy and upscale as an Audi but it did give me an insight as to how it was assembled and what it takes to build a car. All in all, I enjoyed the tour a lot! I told Dave as we left that yesterday he saw where he was born and today his car returned to its birthplace -- pretty neat.
We headed back to Velburg but stopped at the Kaserne where Dave works. It's been a long time that I was on an army post -- twice in one week. The funny thing is that it really hasn't changed much since I was here. The GIs now look like high schoolers and probably some of them are not much more than that.
Got back to the apartment at Velburg and after two trips, we got the car cleaned out. Holy crap, we bought a lot of "stuff." We did pick up some boxes while on post and I already have one filled up and ready to ship home.
Dave has to be exhausted after driving most of the day. We were on mostly non-autobahn highways that twisted and turned through the countryside and one has to be so alert at all times with the crazy German drivers. He is an excellent and very conscientious driver which I knew before I got here.
Time to grab something for dinner and then crash.
Later.
No comments:
Post a Comment