Well, today we took a class field trip to the Audi factory over in Ulm a city near Stuttgart. Herr Veit took us with some of the other students on a bus and we had a really cool 2 hour tour of everything. We started in the show room and got to sit in about 7 cars. They were really fun. We were all dreaming very big :) Our tour guide was Lars and he was cracking jokes the whole tour. He took us back through the factory and we got to see all of the assembly lines and a car from start to finish. It takes about 450 parts big and small to make a car. It starts with sheet metal that is pressed by huge machines that weigh a lot and have to be supported by a steel floor to support their weight. The metal is pressed 6 times then stacked by workers for the next step. There were huge robot arms that did a lot of the work. It was crazy to see how precise the robots were and how much they could do. They worked really fast and swung metal around to different stations within one little section. They looked like large orange arms with different tips on them each with a different use and action. Next we saw the welding and detail work on the sheet metal. Some are combined with aluminum to decrease weight and increase energy. We went to the final assembly lines as well where most of the work is done by employees. There is a 12% woman employee rate which is pretty high. Here the cars come out after they are painted (we couldnt see the painting section because of sanitation) They are sent on a slow moving convayer belt and each person has a specific task that they do for one hour on every car that passes. They have 102 seconds to get their specific job done on each car. The car is tilted on a 60 degree angle to the side so wires can be inserted. There are 2.7 km of wire in each car. Then the marriage happens whene the engine is inserted into the bottom of the car's body. It is when the car becomes the name. We saw the Audi A6 being made. We all had a really good time and learned alot about the cars. This plant alone produces 1000 cars per day and the other plant in bavaria produces 2000 cars per day. They only make the cars per order so people order them and they are made and even then there are 3000 made per day. Germans are very proud of their cars. It was a great field trip for the day :)
Love and miss you all so much!! 22 days :)
Love always,
Andrea and the girls!
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