Porsche Heaven:

Well, its been a busy week for blog posts! This morning I had a factory tour of the Porsche factory in Zuffenhausen (a suburb of Stuttgart). Upon stepping out of the S-bahn station, I was immediatly surrounded by brand spanking new Porsches: Carreras, Cayennes, and Caymans. As I walked through the complex to the Porsche museum (the meeting point for the tour), a couple GT3's cruised by with the protective film still on the fenders, having been finished just minutes before.

The tour was incredibly interesting for an engineering student who loves Porsches, and I can only begin to go into the interesting things I saw. (No pictures were allowed inside the production area.) Every Porsche is custom ordered and the cars are built to spec (on the same production line!) in exactly the order they were ordered. Everything is thoroughly modern and computer monitored, but most of the assembly is done by skilled workers who can accomodate the different models. They turn out 150 cars per day, and it takes only 400 minutes to assemble a complete Porsche on the two-level assembly line.

Because the facility is extremely compact with no room to grow, everything operates on a "just in time" principle. This means, for instance, that there is room for only 6 sets of axles in the queu. A car goes by every 5 minutes, so the delivery truck comes from the supplier every 30 minutes preloaded with the next 6 pairs of axles that go with the next 6 cars that are on the line. The carpets, the interior pieces, and every other thing that can be customized is delivered in order ready to seamlessly meld into the apparently random order of the assembly line. Its amazing it works at all, but apparently problems are rare.

The engine shop was also very interesting. All the engines for every Porsche come from Zuffenhausen, and each is hand assembled by one worker from start to finish. The ones destined for cars assembled on site are lined up according to the assembly line order and taken two at a time to the assembly building.

911 Turbo engine cutaway in the museum

Our hour-and-a-half tour finished back at the small but well-equipped museum, where about 20 porsches were displayed, from vintage to racing cars to the modern supercar (Carrera GT). I think the Carrera GT is about the best looking car ever created, so seeing one in person was amazing. I bought a nice hardcover coffee table book covering the 911 for a quite decent price of 15€.

Wow. So many Porsches in one morning. All of them beautiful, even in the early stages of assembly. Its been a good day...

One of 1400 Carrera GT's that will ever exist