Production Porsche two-door sports car 911 and 718 manufacturer in Zuffenhausen.

Production Porsche 911 manufacturer in Zuffenhausen Customers are able to see how a Porsche is being build step-by-step. For the two-door 911 and 718 sports cars, Porsche has already installed cameras at two relevant stations and linked them to the production software. Two more cameras will be added soon. “My Porsche” is the centralised customer portal for car owners that bundles all the offerings and services available for individual cars. The “best-fit” assembly solution – involving automated, sensor-based and precisely controlled assembly of body parts – which had already proven its worth in production of the previous model, was expanded and optimised for the new 911. “The level of automation we use has increased greatly,” Soyez explains, “and the already sporadically used human-robot collaborations (HRC) have been designed with completely new safety features. The robots’ sensors are programmed so that they stop moving the second a person gets too close to the safety cell.” It requires just nine assembly steps to construct the 911 bodyshell in the new plant. Anyone who assembled a model car in their childhood understands the basic idea: one complete section is assembled from many individual components. In the case of the 911 body, the front end, rear end and centre of the floor pan are first joined to the chassis; to this, robots add the front wheel arches together with the shock mounts and main chassis member. Aluminium and steel panels from which the body is assembled are delivered by the relevant suppliers on a just-in-time basis to the main Zuffenhausen plant, from where a tugger train system conveys them to lines in the bodywork plant, as specified by the assembly cycle. Robots lift the chassis of the new Porsche 911 onto the skids using handling grippers, and these skids carry the prepared chassis to the bodywork stations in stages. A virtually complete 911 gradually emerges: the modular roof, doors, fenders, boot and bonnet take their positions behind the side panels. Other new techniques now in use include friction element welding, full self-piercing riveting, and roller hemming (for joining aluminium parts to steel components). Incidentally, the eighth-generation 911 can boast a new record in terms of bonded connections, with a total of 180 metres of bonded seam used in the final vehicle.