Chrysler moves past Caliber production glitch
Wed Sep 13, 2006 9:53 PM ET

RELATED VIDEO
Auto Summit review: Correspondents
Play Video SUMMIT NOTEBOOK



By Kevin Krolicki

DETROIT (Reuters) - DaimlerChrysler AG's (DCXGn.DE: Quote, Profile, Research) Chrysler Group has ramped up to full production at the plant that makes its Caliber hatchback, overcoming a glitch that had limited sales of its hottest-selling new car, the company's manufacturing chief said on Wednesday.

Chrysler's Belvidere, Illinois, assembly plant, which makes the Dodge Caliber and the Jeep Compass, had been hit by a software problem that caused the facility's robots to crash into each other, slowing production of the Caliber in its first months on the market.

At the Reuters Autos Summit in Detroit, Chrysler Group Executive Vice President Frank Ewasyshyn said the plant had reached its full potential output on the previous shift on Wednesday for the first time.

"We hit full rate, full volume on the third shift wide open," Ewasyshyn said. "(It's) the first time we've hit the whole thing wide open, so we're happy with that."

Chrysler has sold almost 60,000 Calibers since the launch of the hatchback in February, making it one of the best-selling American-made small cars this year.

The car, which starts at just under $14,000, has been marketed as a more stylish and feature-laden alternative to the fuel-efficient "econo-box" small cars that U.S. consumers turned away from in the 1980s.

Dealers have reported difficulty getting enough inventory of Caliber, which marks the first attempt by one of the traditional Big Three to take on the Japanese-dominated small-car market with a vehicle made in the United States.

Ewasyshyn said the problem at Belvidere had been in programming the software to run the industrial robots supplied by Swiss engineering firm ABB. (ABBN.VX: Quote, Profile, Research)

Chrysler invested $419 million last year to retool the Belvidere plant, which had produced the now-scrapped Dodge Neon, to make it into a flexible manufacturing facility.

Flexible assembly plants, which can build more than one model at a time, automate key jobs with robots in a bid to better match output to market demand and reduce vehicle inventories.

"What really happened was that we took on a very aggressive launch curve," Ewasyshyn said. "We took on a brand-new technology, and we did run into an issue with the way some software was applied."

The plant's robots, he said, had not been programmed to account for their relative positions on the line.

"The end result was some fairly interesting collisions," he said. "They got to know each other in a way that we didn't want them to know each other, let me put it that way."

Ewasyshyn said Chrysler would monitor future programming decisions far more carefully to avoid a repeat of the problem.

"I don't think it's so much a new kind of execution risk, but it's definitely going to require a new kind of programmer," he said. "It's going to require a whole new level of discipline in the way things are executed."

The Belvidere plant is capable of producing more than 1,500 vehicles per day when running on three, eight-hour shifts as it is currently, he said.

The same assembly plant will also produce the upcoming Jeep Patriot. The Caliber accounts for about 60 percent of current output, but that ratio could shift with demand, Chrysler said.

 

Now if Chrysler was smart, they would have done all of this BEFORE they started actual production of the Caliber. Then they wouldn't be in this mess they're currently in. Hopefully they can start to play catchup before they add the Patriot into the lineup.

 

Ah... when read the first thing about it being a software glitch, I figured it was a Microsoft fault .


I used to live in Northern Illinois, about a half-hour from the plant. I remember traveling past there when they were "retooling" the plant, building new buildings and such, it was the same time that the big news was GM and Ford were reporting loosing billions of dollars per-year, and announcing they were gonna close plants, found it funny, GM and Ford were reducing manning and closing plants, while DCX was increasing manning and upgrading their plants.
But they better watch it... the once hot sales of cars like the 300 and Magnum have begun to cool off... *they should really introduce more fuel-effiecent diesel varieties of all their cars and trucks*. Oh well, if they can't learn their lesson from other car makers....
The Caliber is a cool car though, if I was in the market for a new car, I would definitly consider one!

 

Very funny! ROFLMAO!!!!

 

This is good news - maybe I'll see the car before Christmas....