Dress rehearsal

When the curtain opens on a new Porsche, everything has to be perfectly in place. As with the Panamera Sport Turismo. A pilot hall is where production of a new car model is rehearsed and perfected. The most modern facility of this type is at the Porsche plant in Leipzig. Its staff concentrates on takt times, the art of automotive engineering—and underwear.

Andreas Schmidt has seen and experienced quite a bit. But nothing excites him more than how “the ideas and sketches from the designers and engineers in Zuffenhausen and Weissach end up turning into something as complex as a car.” Schmidt (54) is the director of quality at the Porsche plant in Leipzig. He looks through the glass doors of the big conference hall at the new Quality Center, with its outer master jig and cubing station. A Panamera Sport Turismo is waiting in the audit room, perfectly illuminated on a flawless white surface. And not just any Gran Turismo—it’s the first series-produced car of the new model line. The reference for everything that will follow. The car that will have to pass muster under the glaring lights and the gaze of thousands of critics at its upcoming motor show premieres. Schmidt and Alexander Fijak (40), who directs the pilot hall, carefully inspect every millimeter of the car with both their eyes and their hands. “Absolutely fascinating to see how perfectly the new Sport Turismo has turned out,” murmurs the quality director. “All we have to do is build every series-production car just as perfectly.”

The first reaction is to smile. The second is to frown. Just build it? If it were that easy, there wouldn’t be any need for the new Quality Center. It was Schmidt who drew the first sketches for this complex with a ballpoint pen on a sheet of paper. That was in April 2014. Thirteen months later, the new building, with its six thousand square meters of floor space, was opened. Its heart—Fijak’s domain—is the pilot hall. A father of two who loves to build remote-controlled model cars, Fijak is a resourceful tinkerer and most likely the perfect person for the job he summarizes in just a few words: “Each new Porsche will have to move along the assembly line in a precisely defined sequence with just the right takt times. Here we determine how that will work.”

“It can happen that something is overlooked in the CAD phase,” explains Fijak. CAD stands for computer-aided design. What engineers used to sketch on a drawing board they now generate in the form of 3-D models on a computer. If one detail of a CAD model doesn’t fit, though, that’s not the end of the world, according to the expert. “There’s still enough time to find an excellent solution.” The road from the first design sketches to the start of production generally takes four years. The pilot hall enters the picture roughly one and a half years before the start of series production. If a component really needs to be completely redesigned, it takes six months at most for the revised version to be ready for production. Right now, in the final phase before production is launched, the main focus is on testing different sets of optional features and making sure suppliers’ parts adhere strictly to all of the dimensional specifications. And, of course, continually simulating the assembly process is crucial. No plastic clip should turn out to be too weak and break. No threaded connection should be anything less than perfectly straight. “But those are minor concerns,” says Fijak. By contrast, any errors from the CAD phase have to be corrected promptly. “An engineer might not realize that a component designed on the computer will collide with another component when it is actually installed within the specified takt time.” Then Fijak and his team have to decide whether that component can be installed earlier than originally planned. Or whether it might make sense to shift the mounting point. Or whether a completely new design is needed.

The solution is usually quickly found, thanks to close ties between the sites in Saxony and Swabia. One important tool is a 3-D printer that can produce both metal and plastic parts up to roughly the size of a basketball. “Usually that’s enough,” notes Fijak. “If it has to be bigger—let’s say we need a transmission model—then we have that done by a service provider.” The changes needed on a component are viewed on a large-scale display in the pilot hall and discussed with the design team in Stuttgart. As a result, a mounting point might be moved slightly, the new version of the component printed, and then the assembly tested and ideally approved.