11 Crazy Facts About Car Manufacturing

It's in its name: Detroit-Hamtramck. GM's biggest plant, nicknamed "DHAM," is so big that it spans two cities, Hamtramck, MI, to the north and Detroit to the south. The whole facility is 365 acres, or 3.6 million square feet. There are now 15.6 miles of conveyor running through the plant, which is an astounding number in itself, but that's down from 27 miles four years ago. A new lean facility layout cut down miles of conveyor and dramatically reduced the number of workstations. Since opening its doors in 1985, DHAM has built 3 million vehicles.

The "line" of the assembly line at DHAM is a massive, moving metal skeleton that zigzags through the many different stages vehicles must encounter before hitting the road. You know that whirring electric-powered rack that brings you your dry cleaning? Imagine that, but giant.

Cars are carried on strong metal arms that can support very heavy vehicles. The shell of a car alone (without doors, an engine, seats, etc.) weighs at least 500 pounds.

The line rarely stops. Vehicles move along while the employees install its electronics, dashboard, seats, engine, and more.

They're called AGCs, or automatic guided carts, and they're everywhere. All along the plant floor are magnetic strips that guide the AGCs. The whole system looks a lot like Disneyland's Autopia car ride.

These robots are workhorses. They can carry thousands of pounds at once and shuffle parts and pieces all throughout the plant. In the Brownstown Battery Facility, as soon as the battery panels come in, fresh off of shipping containers from Korea, automated machinery begin moving the parts toward the assembly line and up to the workstations.

There are over 1,300 robots in the Detroit-Hamtramck factory, but removing lint is still done the old-school way. Apparently female ostrich feathers (no boys allowed, because the females' feathers are softer and more durable) make the best dusters. Thousands of plumes are assembled and attached to huge rollers that look like the spinning washers in drive-through car washes. To remove lint, cars essentially go through a car wash, minus the water.

When ostrich feathers rub against each other, they generate static electricity. This charge removes microscopic bits of dust from freshly painted — and dried — car bodies. To ensure that paint sticks to the car's metal body, vehicle shells must go through this feathering process before each coat of paint is applied.

Don't worry, no birds are harmed to make this happen. Ostriches shed feathers naturally, and these plumes were collected during that process.

Show of hands: who has turned down a car because it wasn't immediately available in the color you wanted? *Guilty.* Turns out, that shiny, sparkly automotive hue is applied through a very involved paint process. We weren't even allowed in because beauty products (both men's and women's) pose a serious risk to paint.

There are a lot of things that can affect how well paint sticks to a car. This includes silicone, hair spray, perfume, lotion, and even deodorant. The team charged with putting fresh coats of paint on cars is lovingly dubbed the "blue suit crew."

The vehicle goes through four stages: treatment, a spray that prevents chipping, the base coat, and then the clear coat. After that, it's on to the assembly line.

To create the strongest weld possible, high-frequency acoustic vibrations are generated to marry battery tabs in the vehicles' batteries together. It's a crazy process that involves rapid mechanical vibrations on the molecular level. These vibrations cause friction and therefore heat. It's that heat that joins the battery's copper and aluminum bits. No screws, no adhesives, no melting down metals . . . just insane science.

Evetta Osborne, 47, and Monique Watson, 28, have installed the lithium-ion battery pack in over 80,000 vehicles. That's nearly every Chevy Volt since preproduction began in 2009, along with the Opel Ampera (a European brand), Holden Volt, and Cadillac ELR. Both mother and daughter have worked at GM's Detroit-Hamtramck plant for over eight years, but they've worked side by side, every day, for five.

The battery packs, which are shaped like a "T", weigh over 400 pounds, and it's Evetta and Monique's job to guide the packs into the vehicle overhead, then secure it with 24 fasteners. "We look at these cars as if they were our babies," Evetta told us, as she lifted the battery, with the help of an automated cart, into a vehicle on the line.

Batteries for the Spark EV, Chevy Volt, Cadillac ELR, and other vehicles are built in the Brownstown Battery Facility in Detroit, which is about 20 minutes away from the DHAM plant. This plant is remarkably quiet, especially for a 479,000-square-foot building housing a lot of moving parts. During our time at Brownstown, that quiet hum was only ever interrupted by a slightly jarring chime. When there's an issue on the line, engineers will ring the jingle arm and a supervisor will come by to help troubleshoot it.

These sounds wailed at random intervals, and one of the chimes was actually to the tune of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow," the last song you'd expect to hear in a battery-assembly facility. Each work area gets to decide on its own unique chime. Mine would totally be Michael Jackson's "Beat It."

Huge shipping containers carry the Chevy Volt's lithium-ion battery pack by sea for 11 weeks. The battery, made of 288 cells each, is considered a "class 9" hazardous material, which means it can't fly — it can only float very slowly across the Pacific Ocean from Korea for nearly four months.

When exposed to high temperatures, these types of batteries have a history of overheating, and lithium-ion battery fires cannot be put out by standard fire suppressants on planes, so they have a long journey to Detroit by boat and car before eventually making it into your car.

There are many parts of the auto manufacturing process that don't require human hands at all. The Detroit-Hamtramck plant is home to around 1,300 robots, up from only 400 four years ago. From laser welding to cleaning the dashboard window to transporting the car engines (pictured above), an artificially intelligent robot plays a role in nearly every part of the process.

GM facilities are going landfill-free. All daily waste is recycled, reused, or converted into energy and one man, John Bradburn, GM's manager of waste reduction, makes it happen. One of the sillier, more awesome ways that GM deals with waste is repurposing old Chevy Volt battery covers into wildlife habitats. Yep, what was once a home for batteries is now an abode for nesting ducks and bats. A screech owl moved into the former battery cover pictured here. Nice digs, owl!