Amanda Congdon and crew are now about halfway across the country in in their AmandaAcrossAmerica trek. They recently visited the Ford Kansas City assembly plant in Missouri to see where their ride was born, toured the facility ,and talked to the people who build the Escape. All assembly plants have a final inspection area, and generally an extra audit area. In the audit area, the inspectors take a sample of the vehicles from the final inspection and do a more thorough check to look for other issues that don't get check on every vehicle. When a problem is found in audit they go back and start checking the other vehicles for the same problems.

Since the start of production, all the Escape hybrids have been going through the audit which the Ford plant labels the "Quality Enhancement Area". Due to all the new technology on the hybrid they have been checking every single vehicle before it leaves the plant. According to the inspector, after 2 years of regular production they are now getting down to about the same number of problems with the hybrids that they have on the regular Escapes. The video also shows a plant employee riding around the plant on a bike. This is actually pretty common in car-maker manufacturing facilities. These plants tend to be huge sprawling facilities and it can take awhile to walk from one end to the other. You can check out the plant tour video here or subscribe to the whole video blog series for free here.

[Source: AmandaAcrossAmerica]