Quote:
Steve203 wrote:
even this number is tiny compared to what the Ford Rouge plant was gushing out
I figure the Rouge is a special case as it is so integrated. The steel mill probably ran 24/7, so car output had to be large enough to use all that steel.
<i>I suspect there are still offline assemblies of specialty vehicles going on somewhere in the country still today.</i>
Seeing trucks with only the front clip on the chassis is normal as so many are fitted with custom bodies. And there are always custom shops whacking up cars. iirc that is how the Chrysler converts got started in the 80s: coupes were shipped to Cars and Concepts where the tops were whacked off and some reenforcement welded into the floorpan.
Kaiser at W-R was an early adopter of the present layout, with most of the stampings shipped in nested on skids, to be built up and painted at the head of the assembly line. Almost odd to me that Kaiser went to the expense to move Graham Paige presses to W-R as Graham's body plant was on Michigan in Wayne, just east of where Ford built Wayne Assembly in 53, so it was already close to W-R. Instead, the Wayne plant was sold to Gar Wood, which made garbage trucks there into the 70s.
Studebaker had a different setup. All the buildings were in a central campus, with a web of rail road tracks connecting them. The "new" body plant, built in the 20s, was at the north end of the complex. Final assembly was at the south end of the complex, so bodies were shuttled to assembly in rail cars.
Nope. Not a special case production-wise. The production I'm talking about had nothing at all to do with Ford's adjacent steel mill, etc.etc. It all had to do with downright raw, insatiable customer demand for the vehicles-namely Mustangs. Production on the first two years of Mustang never outstripped demand. Not even close. In fact there were dealers screaming that they could not get enough cars! I know...I was there. If only such a dream situation could have existed for Packard in the mid-1950s like it did for Ford in the mid-1960s.
RE: trucks natually being transported incomplete... As I said previously, in California I said I have seen large numbers of imported pickup trucks (I specified as such) transported incomplete... and large numbers of pickup beds... also transported separately. I also stated that there are reasons for this (legal, financial, and customs fees-wise). But none of this has anything with these trucks receiving custom bodies... just their normal pickup beds.
Over the years there have been imported pickups that actually never got their final assembly until they reached their port facility in the USA. In many cases, this is where pickup beds were finally installed.
Big trucks are another case altogether.
And having worked for an Asian car company for nearly 20 years, I can also assure you that for many of those years, partially-assembled OR incomplete-spec cars arrived at USA ports only to be seriously added to, or have their final assemblies done. Good example here is passenger cars ordered with so-called "factory air"... which actually was not installed when the car was built in Asia... then shipped to the USA... THEN the IN-DASH factory air system was installed... and other things done. This is just one example.
So as I said earlier. The practice continued long after AMC.
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