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My daughter and I were fortunate enough to attend a Porsche Factory Tour yesterday. It was beyond amazing! You must set up the tour in advance. Before anyone asks, no photos are allowed on the tour.
We started in the finished engine room, and then proceeded to the engine assembly room. The engines are intermixed; boxster, 911, Turbo, GT3. Later on the tour, we would find out why. When the chassis meets the body(The Marriage), the cars are built in random. It was really interesting to see the cars intermixed on the assembly line, instead of just seeing the same car.
The cars are truly hand assembled. The only robot on that side of the factory was utilized for applying glue to the windshield. The windshield itself is still installed by humans. The pace of the build is what I would call, relaxed. No workers are rushed. All of the workers that's we watched seemed to have more than enough time to complete their given tasks.
We missed seeing the One millionth 911 built by a single day. Oh well, we did get to see it briefly in the museum. My camera was still stored away in a locker , so no pics of it. It looked great in person.
It was a fascinating experience and I would encourage anyone who is visiting Germany, to get on a train and go to Stuttgart. You won't be disappointed.
Mike
Last edited by newbwrx; 05-14-2017 at 10:47 AM.
Reason: Forgot to add something
When the chassis meets the body(The Marriage), the cars are built in random. It was really interesting to see the cars intermixed on the assembly line, instead of just seeing the same car.
Cool to the max!
The investors have Wendelin Wiedeking and Toyota to thank for that. The workers really were building the same car. The oft told story is that in the '90s, Porsche was troubled having sinking sales due to stale product and high production costs.... almost nothing was shared across models. Herr Wiedeking was promoted to leader and hired Toyota (retired execs?) who made many recommendations... the biggest that you saw was moving to a single, common engine platform and massive part sharing. (The big floater in the punch bowl was the new engine platform was not strong enough to support the turbo and GT models, hence the resurrection of the old "Metzger" block.)
What you witnessed was the result of incredible commonality in the sport car design..... Honestly, their sports cars are all the same... don't kid yourself. Differences in performance have more to do with marketing decisions than engineering ones. Back in '97-98 and those early models, the 911 and Boxster were truly the same car.... the biggest customer complaint of the 911 owners so they said.
This move to commonality has made Porsche, famously, the most profitable car company in the world (on a per car basis).
I did the tour in the summer of 1997 (still in the days of 964 production) and wrote the experience up for my local (San Diego) PCA magazine. The tour back then was amazing and it sounds like it has even gotten better. I did have a chance to have lunch in the restaurant. If you can swing it, the food was great.
They had the "no photo" rule back then. However, when I was leaving and had just gotten outside the fence, a prototype 996 came by and I was able to get a shot of it which became the cover of the September Windblown Witness
The investors have Wendelin Wiedeking and Toyota to thank for that. The workers really were building the same car. The oft told story is that in the '90s, Porsche was troubled having sinking sales due to stale product and high production costs.... almost nothing was shared across models. Herr Wiedeking was promoted to leader and hired Toyota (retired execs?) who made many recommendations... the biggest that you saw was moving to a single, common engine platform and massive part sharing. (The big floater in the punch bowl was the new engine platform was not strong enough to support the turbo and GT models, hence the resurrection of the old "Metzger" block.)
What you witnessed was the result of incredible commonality in the sport car design..... Honestly, their sports cars are all the same... don't kid yourself. Differences in performance have more to do with marketing decisions than engineering ones. Back in '97-98 and those early models, the 911 and Boxster were truly the same car.... the biggest customer complaint of the 911 owners so they said.
This move to commonality has made Porsche, famously, the most profitable car company in the world (on a per car basis).
No photo's is not an uncommon rule - I got a tour of Aston Martin's factory a month ago, they wouldn't let me take pictures either :-(
What was nice about that was that they don't do public tours, I was there on business and the engineer was nice enough to give us a tour of the manufacturing line - it's all in one building so it's pretty cool, we saw everything from the seat leather getting stitched to the final inspections.
I was planning to do a tour this August but won't work out... my wife is German so we go to Bavaria frequently, have been trying to organize a train ride and tour for a while now...
I did the tour back in 2004. It sure is something great to see. The thing that stuck out to the most to me was how they moved parts around from receiving areas to the production lines. Really cool to see the robot trains moving along magnetic painted tracks on the floors.
Seeing this post reminded me of a road trip four of us guys did as 19 year-old fanatics of P-cars in 1973. One's father was a VW dealer and just opened Southpointe Porsche (later sold to Suncoast). Picked up a European delivery VW Westfalia camper in Luxemburg during the trip which included the 24 hr of LeMans to watch Peter Gregg driving the '73 911 RSR. Back then you could take pics inside the factory. Here's a handful ....
05-13-2017, 01:16 PM
Porsche Factor Tour
