Carbon Blog
Keeping Me Up At Night
As the head of production and procurement at Carbon Motors, one of the earliest challenges I faced was to find a practical solution to the promise that we would deliver a patrol car ready to go to work the day it arrived at the customer agency. That meant no shop time at the agency or their up-fitters’ to match the color and exterior graphics exactly to the specification and design required by the customer.
I was pretty sure I knew how to address the exterior color. Our chief development officer, Trevor Rudderham, predefined that we would use plastic exterior panels over the car’s aluminum frame. Easy, I thought. Smart in Europe already do that. We’ll just adopt the same technology for the E7. One small problem – although some of the Smart’s exterior panels were composed of self colored plastics, the gloss parts were painted. We’d already said no paintshop for Carbon, either at our plant or at our suppliers. We wanted to find a more environmentally friendly solution, and the self colored parts suffered from ultra-violet degradation and were unlikely to meet our demanding test standards. On top of that, some of the bigger panels on the Smart were thermoset materials rather than the recyclable thermoplastics we wanted to use.
Working with BASF, we found a process using a chemical film that can be applied to each part as it is formed which provides a highly durable finish that can range from high gloss to matte, and is available in the same range of colors as conventional vehicle paints. Since each car will be built to order, we can have individual panels delivered to the Carbon assembly plant to match each customer’s order. This means that every panel could be a different color if that’s what the agency wanted.
So the livery solution has been identified, but what about the graphics? 19,000 agencies meant at least 19,000 different exterior appearances. This was keeping me awake nights! How were we going to keep our promise that we would deliver vehicles ready to go to work without having a huge end-of-line system. We checked with a number of the existing graphics contractors and learned that it could take up to two days to get a full complement of stripes, notices and badges/shields on a car. Can you imagine the line length required to finish up to 200 cars a day? Our estimated time in each workstation when we reach full forecast volume will be four minutes, and even with four people at each station that will only give us sixteen minutes of work. Two days effort is about sixteen hours meaning we’d need 60 stations just to apply the graphics! To add complications, the Carbon team was demanding an extremely aggressive durability target, way beyond the current market norm and beyond the capability of some of the available processes. More sleepless nights! We needed a new approach.
I finally made contact with a Michigan based company who produce graphics for all the major auto manufacturers, understands the durability requirements, and are familiar with the need to apply them at line speed. Our volumes will be about a fifth of some of the existing assembly plants that run at less than a minute per station so their knowledge of what could be achieved was extremely valuable in defining a solution. However, we’re talking about an extensive array of graphics not just a couple of racing stripes down the side and a GT badge on the trunk lid.
We determined that we would need a combination silk screen and digital printing facility set up adjacent to the Carbon assembly line to produce the graphics for each car as it came back from its end-of-line checks, for finalizing and pre-shipping preparations. Since the exterior profile of each E7 will be the same we decided that we would incorporate registers on each panel that would match registers on each graphic carrier, and by using the same techniques used in the bigger plants we would be able to complete the exterior adornment in about 30 man minutes, equating to just two stations. Relief – a solution, sleep at last. But wait a minute – there are at least 19,000 different designs and there will certainly be updates and redesigns happening every day. How are we going to handle that added complication? Additionally, at E7 launch there will be no graphics suited particularly to the car, and designs will have to be adapted from existing layouts. Our partners took the problem in their stride. “Have each agency send us a set of pictures of their existing cars, identifying any modifications they want and we’ll design new graphics to suit the E7, send it back to the agency for approval, and when agreed transmit it to the line-side set up ready to print when the car is in production” they said. No matter how much graphics are on each carrier, the time to apply the graphics to each body will be the same. Of course, the more content the more expensive and longer each carrier will take to print.
At last we had a solution for the complete exterior of the car! We can now concentrate on refining the process, defining and procuring the printing equipment and designing the assist systems required to help our assemblers do the job right each and every time.
Tagged: carbon motors, american automaker, time, time zone, global, police, police car, cop, cop cars, cops, purpose built law enforcement vehicle
Comments
There is no one that I could imagine that would be better at solving these complex production problems than Alan. You have a jewel in experience and imagination. All the Best.
Alan, Fantastic job on a very complicated problem. You could also check with NASCAR and get with the companies that design and produce the graphics for their race cars. They quickly design and produce what amounts to a complete 'paint job' in applied graphics for the vehicle. If they need a new hood, fender etc they take a stock one and literally apply the graphic that looks like and for all intent is a highly polished paint job. Jim
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