Visit to Nissan, Sunderland

This week we visited Nissan's enormous car manufacturing plant in Sunderland. This was a fascinating insight in to the systems and processes behind mass manufacture of cars.

One thing that I found particularly interesting was the time that it took to do a job. Every single job that needed done - whether it was putting in the seats or installing the engine - took 59 seconds. This was vital to the flow of the continuous production line and the efficient manufacture of the cars. I can't even imagine the level of thought that must have gone in to the design to both make parts that work as intended AND can be fitted in less than a minute. 

Interestingly, though, despite all of the clever design done back at the office, some of the simplest innovations were made by the factory workers themselves. For example, workers used to have to carry a heavy tool belt with all they required to attach parts to the car as it moved along the line. A worker came up with the idea of a tool rack that can slide along a rail, minimising the weight that workers have to carry. I have to say that I was surprised that nobody had thought of it before, given the level of ingenuity in virtually everywhere else. 

I was also interested in the sheer amount of stuff that went in to a car. The bodyshell was inherently light - a person could easily pick up a whole side of a car. So why does a Nissan Quashqai weigh over two tonnes?! A lot of it seemed to be just stuff really. Electric everything, plastic everything. The dashboard in particular was an absolutely massive piece of plastic, too heavy for a worker to lift - unlike the main structural parts of the car!

So it got me thinking. Nissan Sunderland produces more than 500,000 cars a year. If each weighs on average 1500kg (a conservative estimate) then just that one plant is using 750,000,000kg of materials every year. Seven hundred and fifty MILLION kilograms. And Nissan have 40 manufacturing facilities worldwide. It struck me that designers have a huge responsibility when dealing with products on this scale and magnitude. By saving just one kilo on each car, just the Sunderland plant alone would save half a million kilograms of resources. By saving 500 kg per car - not impossible, family cars in the past averaged below 1000 kg - Nissan would save an incredible 2,551,489,500kg of materials, based on their global sales for 2013. That's over two and a half BILLION kilgrams of materials that have been dug up, refined, transported, manufactured in to a car, transported again, and then dragged around everywhere the cars drive for the rest of their working lives. It then all has to be disposed of too! 

I realised that this was serious. How come in the 1950s we could produce family cars that weighed a quarter of what a Quashquai does? There have been advances in safety and performance, granted, but there have also been advances in materials, engine technology and manufacturing methods. Why can't we be as frugal with materials as we once were, particularly in the day of real environmental concern?