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  • SUPER FACTORIES

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It rockets from 0-60mph in 5.6 seconds and reaches 155mph before an electronic speed limiter says “that’s fast enough”. It handles so well, the G-forces might make you lose your lunch before the Z4 loses its grip on the road. To manufacture such an artful instrument of automotive pleasure requires three super factories.

The first factory, in the Bavarian heartland of Landshut, Germany, casts the automotive industry’s first magnesium composite crankcase, which results in the world’s lightest six-cylinder crankcase. The second factory is in Munich, Germany which takes the lightweight crankcase and precision assembles a 3.0-liter inline six-cylinder engine that delivers 255 horsepower. The lean German muscle is then shipped to a third factory – in Spartanburg County, South Carolina, USA. This last plant is a forerunner in environmental innovation, being the world's first automotive factory to recycle landfill methane gas from rotting trash to power its plant.

Now onto the sleek and raw power of the Corvette Z06, the fastest most powerful production Corvette every built. Visit the Corvette factory in Bowling Green, Kentucky, the only location in the world where a Z06 is built from start to finish in 36 hours.

The materials used to make the sports car’s body and frame are more technologically advanced than what is commonly used in a racecar. Every Z06 engine is hand assembled by one builder and the structure of the sports car has been painstakingly crafted to be lightweight. It is the most aerodynamically efficient Corvette ever, travelling almost half a kilometer in less than 12 seconds at two hundred kilometers per hour.

All these components make the Corvette Z06 a fierce competitor in the sports car world, surpassing most in road performance and handling.

EPISODE GUIDE

  • Super Factories: Winnebago
    Winnebago is America's motor home. People know to expect perfection from every motor home that is assembled in their 400,000 square foot factory in Forest City, Iowa. Here every inch of a Winnebago coach is built for life on the road. Inside and out it is carefully crafted and designed on a 1000 foot assembly line. Their newest cross-country colossus: The Vectra. Four hundred square feet of movable mansion, it's an RV revolution. With a new chassis design, this motorhome even has a 220 cubic foot basement. And it's a speed machine, cruising up to seventy-five miles an hour on the highway.
  • Super Factories: Corvette
    Go behind the scenes at Corvette, where they create the ZO6 supercar. It has a unique, hand-built, powerful engine that can propel it to speeds of 200mph.
  • Super Factories: Caterpillar
    A truck the size of a two-story house, strong enough to carry 380 tons, at 25- feet tall 3550 horsepower, -more than 30 Ferraris - this is the biggest mining truck in the world, the colossal 797 B. Built in the USA in Decatur Illinois, It's job? Move material at high volume and low cost. But how do you build a two-story goliath. It requires a specialized factory were everything is super sized - from the plasma cutters and weld- guns to the torque tools and hand wrenches. Imagine installing a 12-foot wheel or an engine bigger than a car. From basic blue print to the completed mega truck, we'll follow the building of CAT's most colossal creation on Superfactories!
  • Super Factories: Ferrari
    Inside a top-secret factory in Italy, witness the creation of the newest and most powerful Ferrari yet. Learn the design secrets of this incredible sports car at every point along the production line.
  • Super Factories: Fire Truck
    It takes a super factory to build this ultimate fire truck. From high tech lasers to heavy lifters no one does it better than Pierce Manufacturing. Pierce Manufacturing has created the ultimate fire truck: the 100-Foot Heavy Duty Ladder model. This fire-fighting powerhouse is a jack-of-all-trades. It can reach 100 feet and shoot a water jet at a blaze-busting two thousand gallons a minute. Top it off with precision-point handling, breakthrough safety innovations and superior suspension; and the fire truck is taken to high-tech heights.
  • Super Factories: UPS
    When it absolutely has to get from Point A to B, overnight, or even in hours, UPS is on call. Every day, millions worldwide depend on this delivery and logistics company, to the tune of four billion packages each year. Step inside the largest, most efficient and high-tech automated delivery system on the planet. More than a courier, UPS is a transportation network of staggering proportions, complete with a meteorology centre, a flight-simulation training hub and the eighth largest airline fleet in the world. And at the heart of it all is their super factory in Louisville, Kentucky, a pulsing, pounding, 24/7, four million square foot one-of-a-kind technological wonder.
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