AT LONG LAST and multiple thwarted attempts (pandemic and chip shortage) I have finally managed a successful field trip to Subaru of Indiana for their manufacturing tour!!!!
17 years ago, my baby car was born right there!!
We got to see—EVERYTHING, from the steel and aluminum coils to them being stamped into thin sheets to the tool and die process to the welding to the drivetrain, suspension assemblies, brakes, front consoles, trim and finish, paint, quality testing (various points), tires on conveyor belts like little doughnuts, cars on doing brake tests, cars on dynos, cars being pressure-tested for leaks… And also Subaru NICU, where all the cars that don’t pass their tests go for diagnosis and repair (ope).
You weren’t allowed to bring anything into the plant, so my highlights from memory:
One of the transfer presses that stamps out body pieces was, when the plant was constructed in the 1980s, the largest piece of industrial machinery ever imported into the United States. It came via the Panama Canal, up the Mississippi, up the Ohio River, and then they had to built an entire port in order to get it out of the water. It then took three days to drive all the pieces up to Lafayette, Indiana. We got to see it punching out interior door panels!
There are various buffer zones in line production so that if one part of the process gets slowed down it won’t automatically cause a slowdown in the entire plant. The place where extra engines are stored when they’re in buffer status is called an “engine hotel.”
The USDM 2.0 and 2.5L engines are built at SIA, though transmissions come from Japan fully-assembled.
There are different musical chimes for each part of the line, and it chimes when there’s a slowdown in a particular area so people can keep track of what’s going on and where the bottlenecks are.
SIA currently manufactures USDM Legacy, Outback, Ascent, and Crosstrek models. USDM Forester, Impreza, WRX, BRZ, and Solterra are built in Japan and shipped.
The SIA test tack is the second largest oval track in the state of Indiana, second only to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway—SIA also has an off-road test track.
The paint process interacts poorly with silicone-based products, so painters cannot use a long list of shampoos, soaps, chapsticks, lotions, etc. They also can’t eat popcorn, because the oils stay on human fingers for 2-3 days?!
They don’t batch paint—so instead of painting 20 red cars, say, you’ll see different colors coming out right after each other. All the Subarus they built are made to order, which means each already has a customer who triggered the construction of this vehicle.
