My vacation is a tour with a new Porsche 911 Carrera 4S.  The day started with a detailed instruction for all the features in the new car (“every ten times you wash the windscreen, the headlamp washer activates, but only if the headlamps are turned on”), followed by an incredible tour of the Porsche factory.

The tour begins with a visit to the “supermarket” where all the trolleys containing all the parts necessary for subassemblies are loaded by hand but with a bar-coded “pick by light” system where the factory computer systems indicates what are necessary.  The box o’ parts are placed on an automatic transport robot that autonomously follows an induction lead in the floor -- even calling for the elevator and waiting for the robot in the elevator to exit before entering.

The upholstering section showed a giant hide on a table, which has its picture taken.  A worker takes a mouse-like device and virtually cuts off the parts of the leather with defects.  The hide is then placed flat on a high-pressure water cutting table and a laser scans and outline of the the photographed shape, which a worker uses as a guide to place the hide.  The laser scanner then makes a comprehensive shaping-match scan, and a computer numerical control algorithm determines how efficiently the given hide can make a set of leather panels such as those for seats, handbrake, steering wheel and so on.  Then a big cowl lowers over the tables and the CNC water knife gets to work, with a spout width of 0.1 mm and a 43,500 psi.  That’s a lot of psi.

Walking past the building where the very first VW Beetle was built, we entered the main factory.  Station 1 is where the basic body enters, and Station 118 is the finished car.  Whole cars are hoisted through this assembly line and those automatic parts trolleys are roaming around everywhere.  The best part of the tour is where the engine-transmission-chassis is married to the car body.  Those flat six engines are huge.  And you can see the AWD versions having a drive shaft coming forward from the engine, past a u-joint, and into a torque distribution unit.  On the outflow of the line, passing under a car suspended on the auto-gantry, you can see the channel in the underside of non-AWD cars, where the forward driveshaft and TDU would otherwise reside.  The end of the assembly concerns testing, including “did the door make the right sound when shut”.  And in all of it, the only roboticized part of the assembly was the installation of the windshield.

And no pictures were allowed for any of that.

But picture-taking was allowed in the big new museum.  I visited the old Porsche museum in my Grand Tour 2002, but this place is amazing.  Even the architecture of the place is interesting.  So what follows are some of the best pictures I took, followed by pictures of my own new car in the hotel parking lot.