I want to be emperor

Although the Dachu Empire's automobile industry has been developing for several years, automobile production has reached an annual output of 100,000 vehicles.

But except for car factories, car shipping docks, and train stations, it is really rare to see hundreds of cars in ordinary places, and the same cars are lined up together.

This scene, not to mention the people of Chu during the second industrial revolution, is also very shocking even to the people of the 21st century in the original time and space... This is a unique thing brought to people by the industrial era. Shocking.

Just like people in the 21st century, when they went to see the American aircraft production factory during World War II, they saw row after row of four-engine strategic bombers being intensively produced in the factory... By the way, , this kind of production capacity of the United States during World War II, even in the 21st century, no more than ten countries can achieve it independently.

Not to mention the industrial capabilities of the United States during World War II, even the many industrial production capabilities in the Chu Empire today, even in the 21st century, can still only be achieved by medium and large industrial countries.

For example, a main gun with a caliber of 300 mm and 40 times... Ordinary small and medium-sized countries in the 21st century simply cannot produce it.

It also has the ability to produce hundreds of thousands of cars per year. Even such primitive cars cannot be produced independently in most countries in the 21st century!

Of course... this is talking about independence, when everything from raw materials to equipment and production is done by oneself, without the need to import raw materials or processing equipment.

Otherwise, in the era of globalized industry, as long as they are not sanctioned, any cat or dog can be produced by importing raw materials, imported equipment, hiring foreign engineers or even foreign workers... But in this way, except for the assembly factory here, everything else Nothing is yours anymore.

Industry requires a system, and the system needs a population to support it... Only a sufficient population can bring about an initial internal market, and a sufficient population can screen out and train high-quality talents, and then obtain a batch of Scientists, engineers and even senior technical workers, a sufficient population can have enough ordinary workers to maintain the huge operation of factories and build large-scale industrial assembly lines.

When you have these, you have a comprehensive industrial system, with almost all industrial sectors, capable of producing all kinds of raw materials, parts, and equipment, then you can implement various industrial standards... And industrial standards, in a broad sense A necessary prerequisite for assembly line production.

If the assembly line is only divided into processes within the factory, and then the workers are allowed to focus on the production of a certain process, this is only the lowest level and a very one-sided assembly line production.

As for this so-called assembly line production, not to mention the Chu Empire, even the Qin Dynasty had already done this.

The early industrial production of the Chu Empire also adopted this kind of assembly line production that was limited to a single factory... Of course, even so, its living efficiency was greatly improved.

As time went by, many companies in the Dachu Empire found that if they produced all the parts of a product themselves, the cost would be too high, so they gradually outsourced some unimportant parts to other factories for production. Reduce production costs and improve production efficiency.

More and more factories are doing this, but a new problem has arisen, that is, many manufacturers that specialize in certain spare parts, such as screws, find that there are too many screw specifications on the market, and almost every manufacturer The screws used have different specifications, and many of them are screw specifications designed by the respective manufacturers.

As a result, although spare parts such as screws have undergone professional division of labor and there are manufacturers specializing in the production of screws, the production cost is still relatively high because of too many specifications.

What to do at this time?

Some companies have begun to abandon their self-designed screws and adopt the screw specifications and standards of some large companies... Because when screw factories produce screws that are standard for these large companies, the overall cost has been better controlled due to the large output and long duration.

Under such circumstances, if an ordinary company insists on using screw specifications designed by itself, the price will be more expensive... If it directly uses the standards of those large companies, it will be relatively cheaper.

The official industrial management department of the empire also quickly discovered this situation. Subsequently, the Quality Standard Management Department of the Ministry of Industry and Commerce took the lead and organized a large number of enterprises to conduct discussions, and finally formulated various screw standards with unified specifications.

From then on, when companies need to use screws to produce industrial products, they can go directly to the market to find various screws of standard specifications...

What benefits does this bring?

The procurement cost of parts will be further reduced, and significantly reduced... If you design a screw yourself, and someone else's factory produces it for you, you will have to buy a new mold and build a new production line... This cost is not low.

If they are standard parts, then it is simple. Professional screw factories have a lot of ready-made products, and they are supplied in large quantities, so the price is very low.

The same principle applies to many other industrial parts.

The Quality Standards Management Department under the Ministry of Industry and Commerce continues to explore and develop a large number of general standards for reference by various companies.

Nowadays, when many industrial products are produced, not all parts are produced by one company. In fact, most parts are purchased, especially universal standard parts. Only some non-standard parts are purchased. Only standard spare parts, more unique or high-tech, confidential spare parts will be dealt with directly.

As a result, a company's current production model generally produces core spare parts, or high-premium spare parts, while purchasing large quantities of general spare parts from outside, or large quantities of non-standard spare parts, and then assembling them together.

This kind of industrial production is defined in the Chu Empire as assembly line production in a broad sense... It is not limited to one or two companies, but all companies in the whole society participate in it.

In this way, the cost of industrial products can be significantly reduced and production efficiency improved.

The automobile production in the Dachu Empire was a typical model of this generalized assembly line production.

Almost every one of today's four major automobile manufacturers cannot produce all their own auto parts... Even the core technologies of the so-called four major automobile manufacturers, the engines and gearboxes they produce by themselves... In fact, there are many Spare parts and processing materials are purchased from outside.

For example, the electronic ignition engines of the three major automobile companies, the spark plugs used in the engines, and the matching electrical systems, although the core technology belongs to them, are basically entrusted to those electrical companies for OEM production, or the two parties set up cooperative companies for production. of.

Not to mention other parts, such as windshields... these are all produced by glass companies.

Also which rubber companies are producing the tires?

There are many kinds of similar... There are tens of thousands of spare parts in cars, most of which are purchased from abroad.

Strictly speaking, the four major car manufacturers are just assembly plants... but due to technology and patent restrictions, they can only assemble specific engines, gearboxes and even cars themselves, and then sell them to the outside world.

The various industrial standards formed in the Dachu Empire were an important reason why the Dachu Empire's automobile industry was able to quickly form large-scale mass production capabilities after repeated struggles and small-scale manual production in the past few years.

Without such a set of universal industrial standards, it would be impossible to effectively integrate the industrial production capabilities of the entire society, reduce costs, and achieve an annual output of 100,000 cars.

And it is still growing at a rapid rate... Among the four major automobile manufacturers, even Li's Power Company, which has not yet figured out a real electronic ignition engine and half a bucket of gearboxes, has begun to scale up. A super large-scale production factory has been built,

According to their parent company's announcement, Lee Power Company, a subsidiary of Lee Steel, will build a large-scale automobile factory in Guangzhou with an annual output of 100,000 vehicles, and has reserved a large amount of land for factory construction. If necessary In the future, the scale of the factory can be further expanded to increase the production capacity to 200,000 or even 300,000 vehicles.

Not to mention the other three major automobile companies, Tangshan Automobile Company already has three production bases, and the current output of various cars has reached 100,000 units... Of course, a considerable part of the production capacity is still used. To produce tractors, harvesters and other agricultural equipment, the production and sales volume of pure cars is still relatively small, only tens of thousands.

Liaodong Machinery Company also has an annual production capacity of 20,000 vehicles and is continuing to build factories. After Hekou Machinery Company moved to Songjiang, its core subsidiaries such as Songhe Automobile Company and Hekou Agricultural Machinery Company already had a small factory and built a super-large-scale production plant in Songjiang.

At present, the production capacity of the existing and under-construction automobile factories of the four major automobile companies is expected to reach 400,000 vehicles, of which about 100,000 are various agricultural vehicles, such as tractors, harvesters, etc.

The rest are passenger cars, trucks, buses and other traditional automobiles.

And all of this is based on the existing complete industrial system and common industrial standards of the Chu Empire.

Without these two things, no matter how rich you are or how good your technology is, you won’t be able to do anything...

In the end, what emerged from this huge industrial system was what Prince Luo Jian saw as hundreds of military trucks lining up in the square.

Looking at the many military trucks in front of him, Prince Luo Jian sighed inwardly... To be honest, it didn't take long for him to tell the truth. Even three or four years ago, he never thought that the automobile industry of the Dachu Empire could develop so rapidly!

About four or five years ago, he had heard his father say many times that in the future, the automobile industry, like the textile industry, would become an important economic pillar of the empire and an important force in driving the development of the industrial system and even the entire economic system.

Before this, although Luo Li agreed with this statement on the surface, he was somewhat skeptical in his heart... The automobile industry will develop well and be very important in the future. This is something he agrees with... But before Prince Luo Li It is not believed that the automobile production capacity is enough to compare with the textile industry.

You must know that the textile industry of the Dachu Empire is not an ordinary industry... Don't look at the fact that the textile industry only produces various textiles. Even in the light industry, it is not very high-tech. It seems that the industry is very low-end.

But people who know the inside story attach great importance to the development of the textile industry... Because this thing looks ordinary, textile factories are almost everywhere, and the textile industry is not as profitable as it used to be. Many textile factories go bankrupt and close every year. .

But... no matter how you look at it or say it, it cannot change the size of the economy driven by the textile industry, which accounts for more than 30% of the total economy of the Great Chu Empire...

Year after year, year after year!

This affects not only the textile industry itself, but also upstream steel, machinery... and transportation, which in turn affects shipbuilding, train manufacturing, steam engines, etc.

Even agriculture and animal husbandry are inseparable from the strong role of the textile industry... The Chu Empire has established so many plantations overseas, what is this kind of thing?

A considerable part of it is used to grow cotton... These huge amounts of cotton will eventually be consumed by the textile industry.

In the vast north, Central Asia, Eastern Europe and even the Americas, there are countless Chu people who breed sheep, and the purchased wool is used in the textile industry.

There are a large number of silkworm farmers in the local area, and the cocoons they produce also need to be consumed by the textile industry.

Cotton spinning, wool spinning, and silk spinning combined, just the supply of raw materials affects the livelihood of at least tens of millions of farmers in the Chu Empire!

Why did the Chu people invade Europe? It was because the Europeans set up various obstacles to prevent the Chu people's cloth from entering the European market for dumping.

Well, it was almost the same reason when we attacked India.

It can even be said that the Da Chu Empire’s continuous overseas expansion, especially the expansion in the past twenty years, was mostly to find a market for its cloth...

Many wars can actually be called "textile wars"!

As the prince of the empire, Luo Li was naturally very aware of this... It was precisely because he knew the importance of the textile industry that he was skeptical that the automobile industry could reach the heights of the textile industry in the future!

In his early years, no matter how well the automobile industry developed, it was just a part of the industrial system, just like shipbuilding, train manufacturing, etc... Although it was also very important, it was definitely not the basic pillar of the empire's economic system.

But today... when he saw these military trucks in front of him, he thought about some of the reports on car production and sales he had seen before.

This year’s level is 100,000 vehicles, but what about next year and the year after that? Can it reach 200,000 to 300,000 vehicles?

What about another ten years? As car prices further decrease and cars become more popular, won't we have to produce and sell millions of cars?

If several million cars are produced annually, even if we calculate based on the prices of low-end cars among existing cars, it will be a huge market worth more than one billion yuan.

Not to mention some people optimistically estimate that in the next ten or twenty years, the empire's annual automobile production and sales will even reach the level of tens of millions, completely replacing horse-drawn carriages and becoming the means of travel for the people of Chu... That production value , I dare not think about it!

And such a huge output value will flow into the upstream and downstream through the industrial commodity of automobiles, affecting almost all industrial sectors... Whether it is steel or machinery, or rubber chemicals, petrochemicals and many other things, it will be affected. .

Looking at it this way, the automobile industry is very likely to grow into the empire's economic pillar industry in the future.

Even if the textile industry does not account for more than 30% of the economy, if it accounts for more than 10%, it would be huge.

Therefore, when a group of generals of the Guards introduced to Prince Luo Li how powerful their automobile transport group was and how powerful their transportation capabilities were, little did they know that Prince Luo Li was already distracted, and all he could think about was the automobile industry...

As for things like military vehicles, it seems that they can be used now, and the effect is quite good. In this case, let the military continue to fiddle with it. Anyway, no matter how hard it is, the indigenous people will be beaten... and Don’t expect to get an extra copper penny in military expenditures if you engage in automobileization...

On the issue of military spending, the cabinet and the military have been fighting for decades...no one has won...the cabinet has never been less than the military's regular military spending, and the military has never received additional military spending!

In short, there is only so much military expenditure, so you can do whatever you want with the military...Luo Zhixue has always ignored the upgrading of military weapons and equipment and tactics, and Prince Luo Jian doesn't have much interest in doing so. Tube.

What do you care about... The army of the Chu Empire is invincible in the world... No matter how hard you try, it will defeat the whole world.

So, feel free to do whatever you want!

On the contrary, this industrial economic work is much more important... Therefore, after watching the transportation group's drill in the southern suburbs of the Guards, Prince Luo Jian left a few words of encouragement and then returned to the city. Tomorrow I summoned some people from the industrial sector to discuss the automobile industry.

The people in the Guards were also a bit overwhelmed... Finally, a big toy was brought out to show off. I originally wanted to let His Majesty come to see it, but His Majesty was not interested in coming, so I sent the prince to come and have a look. He also looked like he was lacking in interest.

This made the people of the Guards a little unwilling... After some discussions with several senior members of the Guards, they felt that this was a military truck and it was just a transportation vehicle. It had no direct effect and was not easy to demonstrate. It would not attract the attention of His Majesty and the Crown Prince.

Now, I need to get some real good guys to show off...like an armored car!

Now that the design and development of armored vehicles has come to an end, the Guards has also invited bids for an armored vehicle, which will be ready for training and exploration in the near future.

After these armored vehicles are in place, the Guards are planning to conduct a live-fire drill with armored vehicles in a while... It's not interesting to see a car running around in circles, so I'll give you a live-fire drill with an armored vehicle that can shoot machine guns. This allows people to more intuitively see the important role of armored vehicles.