This is how Porsche’s paint process passes with flying colors.
Porsche is known for its revered and cherished lineup of luxury performance vehicles. It is especially celebrated for its wide spectrum of paint colors, especially in its virtually limitless Paint to Sample library. However, besides the beauty of the colors themselves, how they are applied to the surface of the vehicle’s body is paramount to ensuring their beauty. Porsche’s paint process uses painstaking effort and cutting-edge technology to ensure its finished paintwork embodies perfection.
A ubiquitous image in automotive manufacturing is the robotic arm that applies paint to vehicle bodies, but that’s just one part of Porsche’s extensive paint process. Despite the precision robots have achieved over the decades, the paint finish still needs to be inspected before the vehicle is completed.
Until recently, this inspection needed to be done manually, in a labor-intensive process where keen eyes meticulously looked over the paint finish for flaws. Even with the greatest expertise, this process was susceptible to human error. Now, at the Porsche plant in Leipzig, the process is streamlined and enhanced with an automatic defect detection system.
Two robots scan the entire painted surface, capturing images every 2.5 millimeters, totaling 100,000 pictures during the inspection cycle. Ten computers analyze the pictures to find imperfections. Upon finding an imperfection, its location is marked within a millimeter of accuracy, at which point fixing the imperfection begins.
In addition to fixing mistakes, thanks to artificial intelligence, the defect detection system helps find patterns in imperfections and alert the plant to flaws in the painting process earlier for the process to be improved. Thanks to the efforts of experts at the Porsche plant in Leipzig and cutting-edge technology advances, Porsche’s paint process comes closer to perfection.