Not much to see here for
2016, I'm afraid.
We did introduce a number of underbody/structure changes, like floor cargo tie down hooks (hard to believe they did not already exist) and front of dash changes to accommodate a new diesel engine.
The bigger news, I guess, is that I spent the entire summer in Wentzville building pre-production bodies ("integration vehicles") down the regular production line. It was part of a management initiative to make the build of engineering properties more "mass production" and less "engineering laboratory", especially as the number of engineering vehicles requested got larger and larger.
I loved it. I have always admired the magic that happens in the body shop and felt like bringing all those pieces of metal together is what made and what keeps America great.
Normally when engineering builds take place in the assembly plant all the upper brass does not arrive until the vehicles are coming out of paint and into trim/general assembly, where they then huddle around the vehicles as they go down the final line ( blocking access for the worker bees who really need to be in there up close and in person) and host all their daily wrap up meetings to track assembly issues and resolution (further delaying progress). Ironically - that used to be me, too, but I didn't realize we were all missing the best part.
Back to the summer of 2013: Normally the van front of dash assemblies were not sequenced, the only distinction being either "diesel" or "gasoline" variants. But - since we were building specific vehicles for engineering use I had to introduce the prototype sheetmetal at exactly the right point so that the body would be built up and used for the correct completed vehicle.
To further complicate things I was introducing the special material about a half hour
before the body tracking took place (before the "PVI", or "Primary Vehicle Indicator" was assigned). So I had to count backwards from that point and extrapolate when my material would hit. I counted, and checked and double checked; I don't think we missed any but it was a long period of sitting and babysitting those parts (especially when the line would go down for break or shift change
right before my parts would hit).
I know I had photos of my front of dash sub assemblies all built up, lined up in rows and marked with my writing on the firewall. I've looked everywhere but sadly I could not find them for inclusion in this post.
Otherwise,
2016 looked a lot like 2015, which looked a lot like 2014, which.....looked a lot like 1997, and 1996, and 1995.