Design and manufacture are opposite sides of the same coin. Having failed spectacularly both ways, the USA auto industry offers critical insights into how manufacturing has moved, and design for manufacture along with it. It changes how everything is made, from vehicles to white goods to products and now, critically, to housing.

We have long known auto design in America is ludicrous.

So many of the world's worst cars, from bloated behemoths in the 60s, all inefficient V8s and giant tail fins, to Ford Edsels that Ralph Nader declared ‘Unsafe at any speed’, to pickup trucks bigger than two parking spaces and SUVs more concerned with fashion than function. On TV and in California, the idiocy is the butt of jokes.

But design is only one half of the failing USA auto industry. Manufacturing methods, using assembly lines in factories, the genius of Henry Ford, and improvements over the last 100 years are now obsolete.

Whilst everything seemed rosy in the USA for a time after the Second World War, by the mid-80s something was deeply wrong: Toyota had outstripped Ford in quality, reliability, delivery and price. America had relinquished its lead in automobile manufacture to Japan.

Five years’ research by the International Motor Vehicle Program (IMVP) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) investigated why. The resulting study, published in 1990 in The Machine that Changed the World, described how Toyota had developed ‘lean production’, based on ‘just-in-time inventory management’ and ‘automated quality control’. Cars were no longer made; they were assembled.

Toyota didn't make automobiles as Ford had done. Instead, they developed a web of interrelated, often family-based companies to make the best components, from engines to suspension, brakes, internal fit-out, seating, and so forth.

Then ‘just in time assembly’ avoids the need for long-term storage of components. Less than 40 years after the devastation of WW2 they had phoenixed to surpass their conquerors.

This rupture was adopted by other Japanese carmakers, then in Scandinavia, Europe and, of course, in the burgeoning industry in Korea. Car designs changed too: more plastic forms, bolt-on parts, and replaceable binnacles, together with experiments in hybrids, EVs, and Hydrogen.

But not in the vast factories of the USA. Stubborn with their investments, the very opposite of ‘agile manufacture’. Elon the outlier doesn’t concern us here.

A second disruption has just become apparent to another delegation, this time American industrialists, returning flabbergasted at what they saw in visiting China’s vehicle makers. No longer ‘just in time assembly’, relying on workers inserting internal combustion engines (ICE) into compartmentalised cars, it’s all electric cars assembled by robots. China now dominates the world's auto manufacturing.

Somewhat absurdly, Donald Trump and his inept advisers want to revive automobile manufacture in the USA. He’s litigating with tariffs to get there. But he’s two revolutions too late. That ship has sailed; so far, it’s over the horizon.

The ‘craft’ and ‘mass manufacture’ of the 70s and 80s are left in the dust. It’s now designing for ‘just-in-time’ assembly by robots. China is the world’s factory, not just in labour costs but also in wholesale efficiencies and designs for production.

But right under Trump’s nose there is a successful radical innovation: Plant Prefab makes manufactured homes to replace those lost in the Malibu and Palisades fires. Housing, the last anti-factory refuge, home to design Luddites, is at last being dragged into the 21^st century.

This is instructive as we increasingly see ‘craft’, produced in assembly line manufacture, at a level of precision previously unheard of. But wait, there's more. China, Korea and Japan are now assembling houses with robotics.

Australia is in the same place as the USA with automobiles. We labour on site with our 19th-century approaches. Our governments talk a lot about Modern Methods of Construction (MMC) but are not really listening, let alone investing.

Here's an instructive codicil.

A decade ago, for Kingspan I designed a factory, warehouse and offices to manufacture phenolic resin insulation products. Brilliant boards. 6 Star building. It was built on the remediated site of the former Goodyear tyre manufacturing plant in Somerton, Vic., rendered defunct with the closure of the Ford factory in nearby Broadmeadows.

It was formally opened by Josh Frydenberg, the then Minister for the Environment and Energy. I had the dubious duty of showing him around the brand new facility. I lauded the innovation, suggesting it could be a herald for a more sophisticated approach to making buildings. I went further: the entire area of former auto manufacture in Broadmeadows/Somerton could be repurposed into a technologically advanced centre for industrial manufacture of housing.

It couldn't have fallen on deafer ears. Frydenberg is no longer in the government or Parliament. His replacement seems little better. Somerton is now a giant warehouse for imported Chinese products.

We’ve missed the boat, or rather, the lessons. We continue to be a backwater of craft-built buildings, whilst the world moves on at pace with MMC.

Cross-Sections are Friday musings from Tone Wheeler, following on from the Tone on Tuesday columns. Remember: amateurs draw plans, professionals draw sections; never at cross purposes.

Tone Wheeler

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