I would not consider myself a "car person", but I love design and production. So I was pretty excited when I heard that we would be visiting Ingolstadt to have a private tour of the Audi factory which is headquartered there.
The 95 degree weather was not a friendly environment for the 2.5 mile walk around the campus. The place is enormous - we only saw a sliver of it in the several hours that we were there. My factory experience has been limited to textiles, garment manufacture and hardgoods, so this was light years beyond what I had ever seen, and very impressive. First of all, everything is automated. One building was run by 98% robots, 2% manpower. Station supervisors were positioned in pods above the production floor and observed the production on screens. Audi prides itself on quality, and there are a lot of quality checkpoints along the way to avoid any costly mistakes.
For all of the rules and regulations, I was surprised to find out that workers are allowed to drink beer on the job. They are just not allowed to be drunk. Who determines the difference? Is there "quality control" for that?
Afterwards, we were taken to lunch by one of the development managers, as well as a marketing director and the head of US dealerships. They had a lot of questions for us about the American perception of Audi, as they want to improve their market share here. I don't know if they liked what we had to say - really, we were being complimentary in saying that people who really know cars tend to choose Audi, whereas people who are more concerned with labels choose BMW or Mercedes. They consider those two brands their competition, but Americans don't have the same association with Audi. If they could create a more identifiable image (we LOVE buying into an image in our country - think Ralph Lauren and Apple), they would definitely realize more success, in my opinion.
Anyway, they are beautiful cars. My Dad loves his. Seeing the production line made me have full faith in owning one. I have to start saving my pennies for the Q7 - or get a job there, one of the two.
