Ford Spain Photo Monitoring Tells Right From Wrong

Ford workers are being paid to plant incorrect and faulty parts onto the assembly line, including incomplete steering wheels and defective engine components.

But the cars aren’t lemons in the making: It’s part of a system to make sure all vehicles built at the automaker’s mega-plant in Valencia, Spain, meet rigorous quality standards.

It sees employee Xabier Garciandia spend his working day trying to put a spanner into the works by making sure the wrong parts and flawed components secretly are placed on the assembly line.

Ford’s industry-first Vision System photographs, checks and tracks every part of each of the 400,000 cars and vans assembled and 330,000 engines built at the Valencia plant each year.

Garciandia, a technical specialist at Ford of Europe’s Valencia Engine Vision System, says the so-called gremlin tests ensure the industry-first digital-photo-monitoring system is working correctly.

Faulty engine parts, wrong steering wheels and even mismatched dashboards have been sent down the line, with the gremlin test covering all 34 stages of assembly.

“The Vision System is crucial to ensuring every single part of each vehicle is just right,” Garciandia says in a statement released by Ford. “The gremlin test means we can ensure the system is working perfectly. It is a game with a very serious point; we are making them harder to spot all the time.”

The Vision System captures more than 1 billion photos every 14 days. This also helps generate a composite image consisting of 3,150 digital photographs that alerts plant engineers to any discrepancies.

“The way in which we all use digital cameras has totally changed the way we record our daily way of life, and is now transforming the way we build engines and cars,” Garciandia says. “But we also have to test the tests, and we are doing this in a way that is very simple, but which we believe is unique in the auto industry.”

Ford has a range of rigorous and, in some instances unusual, quality processes at the plant where a new vehicle rolls off the production line every 40 seconds.

These include ultra-sensitive microphones used to register engine connectors; engine listeners to ensure each new Ford Focus RS is running flawlessly; ostrich feathers that are used to dust models before painting to enhance paint quality; an industry-first digital-camera system that identifies vehicle body-shell paint defects; tests that assess customer use of audio streamed via Bluetooth; and a virtual rolling road test to evaluate advanced driver technologies.

Ford models built at the Valencia plant include the Kuga, Mondeo, Galaxy, S-Max and Transit Connect and Tourneo Connect. The facility also builds 2.0L and 2.3L EcoBoost engines.