π
2016-09-28 01:01
in Cars, Germany2016, Ncars
For our 2nd day in Munich, we went to the BMW Factory and Museum, and while we were not able to secure a factory tour spot in English when we enquired 2 months early, due to Oktoberfest, we were lucky enough to get one the day of, by coming in early, asking, and coming back just before 11:30, when the tour was due.
We started by visiting the showroom that opens early, but sadly it didn't have many science/technology interfactive displays, so we then mostly waited for the real museum across the street to open at 10:00. Anyway, a few pictures from the showroom:
By 10:00 sharp, we went to to the museum for its opening:
Between 10:00 and 11:20, we just had enough time to visit the right part of the museum (the part that goes up), and we had to go back across the street for the factory tour starting at 11:30. Sadly, as per all such tours, no pictures. This was the most interesting and complete factory tour I've done amongst Telsa, Toyota in Nagoya, Mazda in Hiroshima, Ferrari and Lamborghini in Maranello. They actually showed us multiple points of the assembly line, including:
welding with an amazing robot setup where they were carefully welding around one another without hitting, but only barely
painting (the whole body of the car being dipped backwards in primer
assembly line bits where robots and humans were mixed in a way that the robots could not crush the humans :)
seeing how due to lack of horizontal space to expand, they had to build more floors and the cars go on elevators to other floors after being carefully inspected by a camera system for defects
people doing wiring
assembly of windows by humans and robots
and the final bit where the cars are driven onto a dyno for final testing indoors
None of the other tours we did showed some many parts of the assembly line. Kudos to BMW for doing so.
The factory tour lasted around 1H45, so after it was over we went back to the museum to visit the bottom/left section, which was more a collection of all kinds of cars, bikes, engines, even aircraft engines, and various technology panels. Also quite interesting.
In the end, we were there until 14:30 or so, much longer than planned, but it was worth it:
beautiful prototype
|