my name is mwd

Yesterday Laura and I went to the Lotus factory and testing grounds just outside Norwich at Hethel. We were booked in on their taster driving experience course but spectacular storm weather meant that we weren’t able to take an Elise for a spin, but that was made up for by the wonderful factory tour, which was a chance to see design and engineering applied.

(we weren’t allowed to take pictures alas, so this one is from Flickr by exfordy)

We were shown round the floor where the Lotus cars, and the Tesla Roadster, are assembled. From start to finish, it’s a fascinating process. From how the car panels are assembled, how the aluminium chassis is bonded together with a glue that’s stronger than the aluminium itself (and a nice shade of orange), how lots of the major components serve multiple purposes, all the way down to the production flow itself.

We were taken around by a Design Engineer named David (apologies to David for forgetting his surname) who did a great job of explaining not just what you were looking at, but why it was so interesting, and what it was that made Lotus special – the attention to applying engineering to make the best race car possible for the price. David, amongst other things, designed the intercooler on the Lotus Exige, of which he was clearly proud; but he was also clearly proud of the little things in the car too. He told us about the little bit of rubber to catch the one drop of water that gets in during soak tests where the side window, roof, and windscreen meet – a proper engineering solution to what might seem a trivial issue.

The tour reminded me of Objectified, the documentary on Industrial Design by Gary Hustwit. A great product is a combination of design thought at all levels – from the “ooh, isn’t that a pretty car/computer/whatever”, down to designing the right parts to make it perform, and then down even further to the design of the things that you need to make the item you’re actually interested in. When milling an iMac facia out of aluminium you also get two keyboards from the gap where the screen is – in every Lotus Elise crumple zone is also the housing for the air scoop for the cooling. It’s attention to detail all the way that makes these products what they are.

Another thing David mentioned is that Lotus will happily use parts from other companies where appropriate. The engines come from Toyota, for instance, but they also buy a lot of components in ready assembled so they can concentrate on what they’re good at. This resonates a lot with the industry I’m in currently – when building a web service of any sort these days you don’t build everything from scratch – there’s a wealth of third party services out there, from open and closed source code libraries all the way to services like Amazon’s S3 for data hosting. As a web startup you don’t worry about building those bits – you use what’s out there already and concentrate on making the cool bit that no one else does (or does well).

If you’re an engineer, I really encourage you to take the factory tour – it’s a delight. Or, better yet, if you know any children who are showing any signs of being interested in engineering, take them – let them see how much of a difference engineering can make in a product they can relate to. David (still without a surname) told us when we started that he went on his first factory tour when he was eight, and now he designs major parts of their fastest car – perhaps we can get more kids making that leap. They apparently cater for school trips too – so if you have a class of children, take them all!

I’m now looking forward to going back now to put all this engineering to the test – it’s only going to get less wet through the rest of the year, right?

ps: fun fact – the Lotus Elise has surprisingly large storage space at the back – you could fit me in it easily – but with only a small aperture to access it. The Telsa Roadster on the other hand has the same space easily accessible – now you know why the Roadster is three times the price of the Elise ;)