Day 3: A Wreck and Detroit

We left Niagara Falls around 9:30, and to save time, I ate three baby bells we discovered in the hotel refrigerator while Alex ate leftovers from her dinner the night before at possibly the only non-tourist-trap on the Canadian side of the falls. (What on earth were they thinking, creating a restaurant that wasn't a tourist trap? I think it's because it was on the border of sketchy-ville, the place where the water-powered tourist economy meets economic reality, so they couldn't rely on tourist bucks to sustain them.)

After our quick breakfast, we took highway 403 out of Niagara Falls; before getting on 403, we passed briefly by Lake Ontario. The main takeaway was that you can't really see Lake Ontario from the road. Ok!  You can however see lots of farmland and wind turbines.

As we were driving down 403, we ran into a terrible, hour-long traffic jam split into two parts, a forty-five minute act one, and a fifteen minute act two, where we learn that our suffering has been caused by a terrible 4-car accident leading to a convertible winding up in a ditch. (Confusing Google News result: Paris Star: Accident Victim Transported to London Hospital.  Took me a minute to figure out why a Parisian newspaper was reporting on this and why they transported the victim all the way to London...but Paris, ON and London, ON are just places that are places in other places.)

Fortunately for us, this was the only major delay we ran into and we made great time for the rest of the trip due to unrealistically low posted speed limits, arriving in Detroit around 2:40. This gave us time to catch the final Rouge Tour that our friend Minyang recommended. It was excellent! Highlights included:

* The intro video that told us that a strong union as a partner of management was one of the Ford company's greatest strengths perplexingly ignored Henry Ford's antisemitism (But seriously, the video was really cool. Did you know Ford worked for Edison and failed twice at creating a company before finally succeeding with the Ford we know today? Also that they experimented with assembly lines by having a person pull a car chassis while people worked on it?)

* The living roof of the Rouge Factory (cool!) and the porous parking lot pavement that allows runoff to be collected and filtered

* A self-guided tour of the plant that assembles the Ford F150.

Below: Leverett dining hall?  Nope!  The Henry Ford Museum.  The architecture was uncannily similar to Harvard.

The Rouge plant itself deserves at least its own paragraph. Industrial manufacturing is an amazing--amazing!--thing. The precision with which the whole process works is incredible. I was impressed to see how smoothly the workers are able to operate, snapping together cars as though they are parts of a lego construction kit--each component is clearly designed to be easily installed. Each worker's torque wrench is computer-controlled to provide the precise amount of torque required, and a computer tracks that each bolt has been put on. It's obvious that a tremendous amount of thought has gone into the design of each workstation (for example, in one we saw a guy sitting in a chair attached to a robotic arm; the arm swung him into each car as it went down the line, so that he could do--whatever it was he was doing.) The factory was incredibly clean--no doubt in part because it's being shown to tourists--but a very impressive operation. It's inspiring to see such a beautiful end result of so much engineering effort.  Unfortunately, Ford doesn't allow photography of the plant floor, so you'll just have to go to Dearborn and see it yourself!

One thing I wondered about during the tour was when testing took place, and how it worked. It turns out that tests are done at the end--after the whole car is already assembled. From what I could tell, each element of the process is so discrete and--in many cases, computer tracked--that pretty much each car comes out OK. (We even saw a guy scanning bar codes on operator's manuals that were being inserted into the glove compartment.) This seems to result in not having to do significant manual inspection until the end, where each car is visually inspected and then put through a series of end-to-end tests--including being driven over pavement and subjected to 2.5 minutes of pouring rain to test seals. They didn't say how many cars in a thousand have failures, or what is done in those cases (I assume they have folks whose sole job is to fix small defects right after the car manufacture is complete.)

After that, we met up with Minyang--she actually works in the Ford building right across the street from The Henry Ford, although we three ended up going to Zingerman's Roadhouse in Ann Arbor, where Minyang lives. Since we didn't eat lunch, we were thankful for the large portions and the chance to see a local establishment. We grilled Minyang on things to do in Detroit--you'll hear more about them in our blog post tomorrow, after we've actually done them.

Our current decision to make is: do we take the upper peninsula or do we make a straight shot to South Dakota through Illinois and Iowa. Current thinking: the UP. But if you've got an opinion and are reading this like, right now, tell us!

An apt salt and pepper shaker set from Zingerman's: