Orders to date?

[TomE]

I thought Matt Windle said in an interview that they could build 4800 per year.

Yes he did. That was with one shift. In response to the unexpectedly high demand at Goodwood 2021 they initiated plans to ramp up to a second shift. There's a bottleneck in chassis production so second shift gets them to 7,000 per year until they tackle that constraint.

In theory the second shift could start between July and Dec 2022, and they had most of the capability in place by Aug but didn't have the flow of parts to support that volume. If parts supply issues get resolved (which may actually take well through 2023) then they could ramp volume up to 7,000 per year in 3-4 months.

 

[Pops68]

I was told buy the plan tour guide it can never be 3 shifts. Lotus assembly workers work 4 days per week, 10 hours per shift (technically less than that since a UK work week is 37 hours). Friday is a catch up / clean up day. I don’t know what the lag time between shifts is, the tour guide did not dive into that detail. That assumes full production line capability of 5000 cars per shift per year so I don’t know how they plan on throttling the line if they can’t sort the 7500 max chassis bottleneck. I imagine they will adjust to 3750 cars per shift to balance it out and spread out the workforce. Putting on a partial shift means part time labor so I doubt that’s an option. Tom’s observations seem to support either of those models but I suspect it’s more slowing the line than adding a partial shift. Either way it’s fewer employees than a fully loaded, 2 shift day.

And just for grins I ran some numbers. Assume 2 full shifts a day, each shift producing 37 hours a week. The car moves between stations every 17 minutes so assume one car moves off the line every 17 minutes. The 17 minutes was also communicated by the tour guide.

37 hours x 2 shifts x 60 minutes per hour x 50 weeks = 222,000 minutes
222,000 minutes / 17 minutes between cars = 13,058 cars per year max.

That would be nice. Sadly though when planning production you should only assume an 85% efficiency rate for downtime/maintenance and other unforseen events.

 

[RENDERMAN]

Belgium 3 Uk 0

That's the closest Belgium will ever get to winning a world cup!