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Old 07-30-2007, 07:24 PM   #8
DGthe3
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Like has already been mentioned, it comes down to safety and practicality. Since safety has been mentioned, I guess I will go into design for manufacturing. This is what seperates an engineer from a designer. A designer cares solely about how it looks, sounds, feels, and probably even smells. but the work of the engineer is to get everything to function properly while making it fast and cheap to manufacture. Without that, the camaros would be at showrooms now, for about $250 000 or more. To this point everything has been hand-built with the only concern being how it looks. To go into production they need to figure out just how they will stamp the sheet metal or mold the plastic. Some of the complex shapes will be too costly to make through mass production so they will be simplified and look almost the same but cost half as much. All this is ontop of getting the interior feeling right and all the mechanics working right.

In the real world, it takes time to turn a concept design into something real. once the design of all the parts has been finalized such that they meet saftey and manufacturing concerns, the molds and dies have to be made in order to mass produce the parts. While that is being done a sequence of how to put things together in the most efficeint manner needs to be determined. Once all that is done, the GM plant in Oshawa as well as all the other places that will be making components, can get retooled. once the parts get turned into assemblies and the assemblies into modules and modules into the completed car. From there it goes onto trucks and trains to the showrooms and dealer lots and then into our driveways.

And there it is, how things go from idea to your home.
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