AAH #813 - How Automakers Can Win New Military Contracts

Finally, they came out

and started talking about what they're doing.

I mean, and it's very interesting to contract, and I'd love to get your input on this too.

You know, Ford went the skunk works route to go lickety split on a program, digital this, that, and the other thing, revolutionized the manufacturing process.

And GM was sort of like, nah, we don't need no skunk works.

We're going to bring our legacy operations up to speed.

Although I'll hasten to add, I think most of this work's being done out in California, not here in Southeast Michigan.

But look, they're talking all the right stuff, going heavy, heavy, heavy on digital simulation.

Everything, design, engineering, manufacturing.

My guess is they're probably even taking this simulation into their supply chain.

um and they're talking about cutting their product development time in half they didn't give an exact time frame they said it used to take them almost five years they're cutting that in half that would say two and a half years i would say two and a half years is still not competitive you know you've got to be in the 24 months and then we can talk about how do you measure You know, when does it start? When do you start the stopwatch? When do you stop it? So Francois Castaigne taught me this.

Francois used to run engineering at Chrysler in the heyday.

You start the stopwatch at Clay Freeze.

Clay Freeze is, you know, in the design studio where you go, okay, nobody, nobody touched that.

That's it.

That's what we're going to production with.

Because that's the point at which a car company starts spending a lot of money.

That's when you start cutting dyes.

And I always thought it was job one is when you stop the watch and Francois was like, no, not until your plant gets to line speed.

So you start spending money at clay freeze and you don't start making a profit until line speed.

So why do these guys need to make clay anymore? Yeah.

You know, that's interesting.

I remember being in the design dome at General Motors being told that they weren't going to do this anymore.

It was all going to be digital.

Right.