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It’s appropriate that Ford, the company which first used the moving assembly line, will be the first to get rid of it.
September 17, 2025
Back in 1912 the Ford Motor Co. faced a big problem. It could assemble about 760 Model Ts a day on three shifts, but orders were coming at a rate of about 1,000 a day. So, the push was on to figure out a way to dramatically boost production.
A small team led by Clarence Avery first hit on the idea to move components in the Highland Park assembly plant by conveyor. They got that idea from grain mills, which would move grain into the mills with buckets on conveyors.
Then they observed how slaughterhouses would hang animal carcasses on a conveyor, which would then move past workers who would slice off a specific part of the carcass. Hey, they thought, why not flip that around and have workers add components to a car that moved past them on a conveyor?
To determine if the idea would work, they set out piles of components along an open floor at the factory, tied a rope around a Model T chassis, and started winching it across the floor as workers bolted on parts. They got out their stop watches to figure out the right speed to winch the car across the floor so workers could keep up with the line. (Today’s assembly lines run at pretty much the same speed.)
The impact was dramatic. In 1913, they slashed the time it took to assemble a Model T by 78% and production soared. Soon, Ford was the world’s largest car company and everyone else started copying the moving assembly line.
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But there is a problem with the moving assembly line: It’s actually quite inefficient. Workers have to pick up parts and walk along the car as it moves down the line. Then they have to walk back to do it again on the next car. Some have to get in and out of the cars. Some have to lean over the fenders, while others are under the car and have to raise their arms to install parts.
All that picking up, getting in and out, leaning, twisting, reaching and walking back adds zero value to the process. In some cases, a line can be up to 50% inefficient. Ford made up for all that inefficiency by adding more workstations and more workers to the line, a practice that the rest of the industry has followed for 112 years.
But today the pressure is on to dramatically cut the cost of making cars. The industry faces an affordability crisis, where global car sales have pretty much stalled out over the past decade because the average household just can’t afford a new car anymore.
Moreover, China formulated an industrial policy to dominate the global industry and shrewdly locked up the global supply chain for all the raw materials needed to make electric-vehicle batteries and electric motors. Chinese automakers are estimated to have a 30% cost advantage over everyone else.
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Like the old saying goes, necessity is the mother of invention. And some very bright minds realized that there had to be a much more efficient way to make cars.
Tesla was the first to propose a bold new way that it called “unboxed assembly.” Instead of long assembly lines with hundreds of workstations, Tesla came up with the idea of breaking a car into several modules: front, center, rear, floor and roof. Each module would be fully assembled in its own work area with all its parts and components. Then the modules would be joined together and voila! A fully assembled car would be born.
For example, the front-end module would have the suspension, brakes and steering, the headlamps, the instrument panel along with the steering wheel and pedals. In short, everything that you can think of that goes into the front end of a car. The rest of the modules would have all their components.
By breaking the car into modules, now workers and robots can install parts from all angles almost at the same time: left, right; front, rear; top, bottom. And the work can be presented to workers at chest level, all within fingertip reach. No more reaching, twisting, leaning or walking back and forth. Not only is it dramatically more efficient, but line workers should also love the new process because it eliminates so much wear and tear on their bodies. They’re not going to go home every night bone-weary. 
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But though Tesla was the first to propose unboxed assembly, it doesn’t look like it has moved to implement it. And so, Ford raced in to fill the gap.
Ford’s Skunk Works operation in California was tasked with developing affordable EVs that would be cost competitive with the Chinese. They picked up the “unboxed” idea and ran with it. Keep in mind that two of the top execs at Ford behind the effort, Doug Field and Alan Clarke, are ex-Tesla employees.
Ford is going to gut a line at its Louisville assembly plant, which currently makes the Escape and Lincoln Corsair, and retool it for modular assembly. Based on Ford’s projections, the result will be dramatic. It’s getting rid of 40% of the assembly stations in the plant and eliminating 600 people, a 21% headcount reduction. Yet, at the same time Ford will be insourcing more work into the plant, which makes the headcount reduction even more impressive.
Ford promised the UAW that no union workers would lose their jobs. It will handle the headcount reduction through normal retirement and attrition, while others will be able to transfer to Ford’s nearby Kentucky Truck plant.
Even so, I’m impressed the UAW went along with this. That suggests Ford has a strong relationship with the union at that plant. But it also suggests the union realizes that if Ford can’t make affordable cars, there may not be a Ford Motor Co. in the future.
There’s a lot more to this program than unboxed assembly. Ford calls the project its Universal EV Platform, and there’s a ton of other clever ideas being implemented to boost productivity and slash cost. But I’ve focused on the assembly part because I consider it to be so historically important.
Ford is scheduled to start using the modular process in 2027.  Sources tell me Toyota, BYD and a European automaker are developing their own versions of it. But Ford will likely beat them to it, and how appropriate that the company which first used the moving assembly line will be the first to get rid of it.
John McElroy
Columnist
John McElroy is the president of Blue Sky Productions, which produces “Autoline Daily” and “Autoline After Hours” on www.Autoline.tv and the Autoline Network on YouTube. The podcast “The Industry” is available on most podcast platforms.
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