Originally Posted by chpsk8

Almost all vehicles are made in "assembly plants" where parts are made by outsource vendors and are made utilizing "just in time" manufacturing. The How Its Made show made some references to it, but didn't get int to it too much. I worked for a Tier1 Tier2 suppler for 9 years and toured a lot of plants in the Midwest.
In fact in my city here there is a company (Johnson Controls) that makes seats for Ford Rangers. The Ranger plant is 30 minutes from here. In the seat factory they get orders and have 4 hours to build the seat and send it to the Ranger plant to be put into the trucks. If the Ranger plant goes down, the seat factory stops.
Most plants operate this way now. The outsource vendor can be a couple hours away, or even attached to the building and delivering via conveyors. They use a process called Just In Time manufacturing to minimize inventory.
Having outsource vendors build the parts of the car and hold the raw materials and labor costs helps keep the cost of the car down. I've seen everything from dashboards to the shell of the car coming into plants from an outsource. I general all they do in the plant is piece together all the parts that come from other locations. Rarely do plants build or create their own parts from raw anymore, although I think there are still one or two Ford Plants that may still be into this. I was more into DCX, Honda and Toyota plants with the exception of the Ford Ranger plant.