LarryB said:
Derek- Not buying, that they've got 10 people putting togather a car in 10 hours either.
. Thats the type of thing Toyota can do, doubt Lotus will ever get there with our version of the Elise.
Actually, Toyota assembles its cars on a line. That means that one car gets one task done at one time (serial production). This is more efficient for large production numbers, because tasks can be broken down to a very small scale and workers specialized in just one task. In this type of scenario, man-hours and time of assembly are very similar, because one task can't begin on a car until the last has completed.
I'm not sure, but @ 100 man-hours per car, Lotus is probably not building these cars on a line. They're probably assembling in phases, with multiple workers at each phase (parallel production). This means that total
time of development is less than
man-hours of assembly, because tasks in one phase overlap.
P.S. - I think Derek was using the "10 people" as an example of the point rather than a specific estimate of number of workers assembling a car.