LEGO car assembly lines: Your moment of zen

LEGO isn’t just a rectangular brick. There are hundreds of specialized pieces, online building tools, belts, gears, motors, and even software to tie it all together. Naturally it was only a matter of time before builders put all of these tools to work to make the toys build themselves. We found this LEGO car assembly line video on YouTube, made by Daniele Benedettelli, on the Awesomer.

The video, from late 2015, shows a complex assembly line that the user can program to pick different colored front, rear, and roof sections to add to a rolling chassis to build a finished LEGO car. This assembly line relies on pre-constructed LEGO units and operates using a lean manufacturing system with very little inventory and no waste. Kanban-approved.

Of course, being YouTube, plenty of other videos were just a click away, and one LEGO car assembly line video wasn’t enough for us. We discovered digitally-rendered car assembly lines, but we prefer the real thing.

This one, from Martin Enqvist, shows several cars being built at once on a machine at Linköping University, Sweden. This is true assembly-line fashion, and it’s incredibly entertaining to watch several operations going on at once, with the pieces being pressed together before being shuttled forward by conveyor. If you’re a Saab fan, seeing a car being assembled in Sweden might be emotional for you, but otherwise it’s a fun five minutes. (Or a lot more, if it sends you down a LEGO-video rabbit hole like it did us.)