While it would be nice if there would be just one or two issues holding up deliveries - most likely it will be an over simplification of the mountain of challenges Team Ineos will have to fix for us right now.
1.) To begin with it is highly likely that we are still in a rectification phase of all technical issues that were found during the development of the Grenadier.
Typically the goal is to have all of them fixed before production starts. Issues get ranked by safety, technical, reliability criteria and the likelihood of these failures impacting all cars are assessed as well as the severity.
With this, a technical issue leading to a potential safety issue needs to be addressed, as well as a technical issue leading to a failure of a major component that will put the car out of operation. Likewise an issue that has little technical risk but that is impacting the entire production and that will be seen as a failure by customers will need to be addressed.
A low risk, low magnitude issue might be put to the bottom of the list and might not get addressed before production launch, or it only has an interim solution until a permanent fix is being developed and put in production.
The problem is - with a new design like the Grenadier - it can be expected that new issues that were not found during the development phase, will be identified - in production and in the field with the customers.
The higher Ineos sets the internal bar for quality, the higher the chance that vehicles that have been produced already will have to be reworked before being released to the customer. We heard the expression ‚batch and hold‘ in this context.
2.) we need to expand our view on what we think is happening at the Hambach facility to the entire supply base. The suppliers need to ramp up at the same Takt that Hambach wants to produce cars.
They need to refine the tooling, need to train new staff they are hiring, need to fix technical issues that are falling under their responsibility. We are dealing with a brand new frame from Gestamp, new axles from Carraro that are purpose built for the Grenadier.
4.) With all the newness of the Grenadier there is still the issue of the global supply chain constraints that are hitting pretty much every manufacturing domain. These days It is often the case that suppliers that have committed to your supply chain employees and in the MRP system to only let you down the following day. With todays just in time processes this makes you loose a production day. In a car factory you might have up to three shifts worth of lineside material to give you a buffer, but the following day your production is haulted.
4.) People! With a brand new organisation, a brand new design to be created, so many new parts to be built, a new assembly line to be ramped up, new suppliers - there is so much new hiring going on that it is really hard to understand how chaotic the world in manufacturing can be.
Everybody in the organisation will have a very steep learning curve to climb, they will do their very best for sure, but they will make mistakes that lead to new problems. Due to lack of experience it will also take much longer for issues to be resolved.
Ramping up production is not for the faint hearted. It is extremely challenging for everybody involved. From the outside we may wonder why we won’t get an update or firm commitments on dates. Until technical processes are debugged, teams are stabilised, it is really difficult to make a statement, simply because you don’t know what hits you next.
Every day the team will get closer to a ‘boring’ factory, this is a good thing! Because what is boring is also predictable, what is predictable must be reliable.
I understand this is a bit of a handful to read, but sometimes it seems we have a tendency to oversimplify the task of putting a new car in production with a new team.
What you describe mirrors similar challenges I witnessed in the aerospace industry in the design, build and delivery of major complex equipment projects... No matter how carefully one checks the final result, there's always "one more thing" to be sorted. As you rightly say.. "not for the faint hearted"!
