Ford's Valencia plant brushes car bodies with ostrich feathers and scans paint by camera

BBC News reported in 2015 on Ford's Valencia, Spain plant, rebuilt for $2.6bn with 900 robots. Before painting, car bodies pass through giant rollers made of thousands of ostrich feathers. Ford's chief paint engineer Dirk Hoelzer says the system is designed to prevent static electricity from making particles stick, and that the feathers' construction makes them ideal for picking up and holding tiny particles. Visitors to the paintshop also pass through an air shower to blow loose fibres off their clothes.

Some dust still gets through, so technicians worked with the local university on a camera system that finds imperfections barely visible to the eye. After painting, multiple cameras compare the surface to ideal standards and flash colour-coded blemish locations on screens; a red warning sends the car to hand-finishing. The computer analyses 3,150 images in 15 seconds, so the line keeps moving.

Paintshop manager Jose Asencio says workers used to spend 70% of their time inspecting cars by eye and 30% repairing; they now spend 10% scanning and 90% finishing defects. Ford also adopted a '3-Wet' painting process, and Asencio says painting time and CO2 emissions are each down 20%.

Dust that lands in wet paint is expensive to fix, so removing it before painting is cheaper than finding it afterwards.

Ostrich feathers are good at collecting dust without building up the static that makes particles cling.

Computers can examine thousands of images in seconds, which people cannot do on a moving line.

Moving human time from inspection to repair raises output without adding staff.

Pair a low-tech trick that prevents defects with automated detection that frees skilled people to do the repair work.

The BBC reports the plant employs 8,000 people, 1,000 more than 18 months earlier, and would make 400,000 vehicles that year, 40% up on 2014, with capacity for 450,000. An IHS analyst quoted said the plant is very efficient but its build pace is nothing outstanding. The figures are from Ford managers during a press visit.