Opel played really, REALLY dirty and made the Lotus Omega's/Lotus Carlton's birth as difficult as it could possibly be. That's why completed cars were first shipped from Germany to Norfolk to be stripped and then modified into Lotus's. The Labour intensity required to do all that almost killed the project dead before the first cars were built!
I'm not sure I entirely agree with that. From what I know car production lines are highly automated and the cost and implications of altering the flow of parts or stopping the lines or altering things to allow the fitment of special parts etc is phenomenal. That's why it is often cheaper to build complete cars and tear them apart once they've come off the line especially for low volume stuff or build them on a separate line as BMW used to do with their M cars. Also I've heard it said that completed cars are much easier to move around for transportation wich makes sense really.
JM2PW
That's fine Duke, Everyone is entitled to their own opinion mate! I will suggest that you read the Adcock book though for a better understanding of this challenging time twenty years ago.
I'm an ex-Lucas Girling employee myself, I started there as a humble Apprentice and left a decade later as a Grade III Craftsman. When we in the 1990's had to supply customers like Ford with brand new brake components for older out of production cars that they had sold at least a decade before
(like the FWD Series 1 Escort RS Turbo)...dedicated Teams across the Drumbrake and Caliper departments were set up to reproduce the required obsolete stock order. Ok these reproduction orders didn't go anywhere near our Factory's then modern Robot Cells, so these components were made the old fashioned way using our onsite Toolroom and its machines with lots of manpower too.
Production numbers could be anything from as little as just a 100 finished components to well over a 1,000,000 parts plus as the Customer got exactly what the Customer wanted. Obviously these Teams manpower size depended on the quantities required on the order and our loyal Customers were charged allot more for this more personal service but it wasn't at all an inconvenience to the rest of the factories production lines and facilities like you described Duke.
At that time, when Lucas was developing new technologies for both car and heavy duty braking systems, we could have companies like Lamborghini to Rover or Volvo to ERF send us as many mule vehicles as we wanted or needed and these never seemed to upset any of their car manufacturing processes either.
Mind you this was back when Lucas Girlings was developing stuff like the ABS system for the Lamborghini Diablo and the aluminium rear drum brake for the Mercedes A class which was all done only a short time after the 1990 to 1992 production years for the Lotus Carlton/Lotus Omega at Lotus in Hethel. Anyway, I've digressed here a bit....
Roll onto 2011...Watching the "Megafactories" series on Sky's Discovery channel now shows that the modern computerisation of car production lines can now make it very easy indeed to send any vehicle at any stage of its production where ever the operator wants it to go in the Factory. These TV programs have shown me companies like Chevrolet rejecting Camaro shells and sending these off for re-welding in another factory deparment to Porsche re-jecting, re-painting and then re-baking its quality paint process after defects were found too.
Talking of Porsche, it also showed how any custom one off coloured paint could be done to any Porsche vehicle whilst it was sat in a normal sequence on the standard Porsche production line. So why dosen't this special action throw a spanner in the works of the Automated production line then??
So if all of that can be done by a simple click of a mouse or by an operator pushing a button, Read a copy of the Adcock book and see how a severe lack of inhouse cooperation and Global recession nearly killed off the Lotus Carlton/Lotus Omega Duke.
JM2PW2!
