By Jonathan Mellberg
My wife has always been a good gift giver. Her only problem is that she always feels guilty not buying me enough stuff, so she buys more stuff. Which really isn’t a problem; not for me at least.
Years ago while living with roommates (this is to illustrate that we had cable TV, which they paid for) I stumbled across a National Geographic program called “Ultimate Factories”. That episode’s selection of interest couldn’t have been more perfect; they were reporting on the Ferrari factory in Maranello, Italy. The Ferrari factory to me is what the Chocolate factory was to Charlie; you don’t really know what’s going on in there, but you know it’s beautiful, magical, and quite possibly the greatest thing you’ve ever known. Surely, you think I’m joking; I’m not. And watching the entire episode only further proved this. I learned that Ferrari has its own state-of-the-art wind tunnel on-site, as well as its own private race track (called the Fiorano) where each new Ferrari is driven on. Ferrari’s standards of excellence border on obsessive, some might even call them ludicrous. To me it only reinforced that old saying “you get what you pay for”, which must also be Ferrari’s unofficial motto.
It was probably a year or two after that before I tracked down the episode on Amazon.com and purchased the DVD. It was then I found the real treasure: the Ultimate Factories Car Collection, with over a dozen episodes peeking inside the factories that produce some of the coolest cars on the road: Porsche, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Rolls Royce, Bentley, Lamborghini, and even Bugatti. If you’re at all curious as to what processes go into building the 911, Z4, Challenger, Phantom, or the Volt, this DVD set is a must have.
Admittedly, watching them all back to back gets a little repetitive, like déjà vu on repeat with detail variations. Whadaya gonna do; they’re factories, there’s going to be similarities (except of course the Bugatti Veyron, which is built unlike any car in the world). It’s the little differences between the factories that help break up the repetition. For instance, Ferrari uses robots (as most factories do) to paint is beauties, while rival Lamborghini ships its cars off-site (though still within Italy) so as to let artisans hand-paint each car. And while most major luxury brands use laser guides to map out hides of leather to slice through them, some factories use lasers to do the cutting while others use fine, high-pressure water pics (think if a laser pointer and a pressure washer had a baby) to snip through the hides. Some factories can wow you with their sheer ability to produce cars in mass volumes, while others brag about how many man hours it takes before their autos roll off the factory lines.
All in all this set should please any auto-aficionado who is at all interested in how today’s coolest transportation is constructed. And if you’re lucky you’ll have a partner who can’t help but buy you great gifts, just like my wife.
No comments:
Post a Comment