Who cares if it takes an extra 37 minutes per car, if they can maintain the same throughput, it won't matter a single bit (except possibly someone having to wait an extra 37 minutes to get their car...)

The extra time spent on manufacturing has as much to do with margins as the delivery truck getting stuck in traffic does. As long as it's not holding anything up, then there isn't an issue.

And it sounds to me like this is a temporary solutions while they fix the root cause, which seems like a really goddamn good idea vs just shutting the whole operation down and giving up.

If you need say 100 million in hardware and 1,000$ in manpower to build a car then spending an extra 100$ in manpower is cheap even * (5,000 * 0.14) = 70k per week. Meanwhile you might be paying 70k per hour the line's stopped.

Granted, you don't want to wait a full year to fix a production issue, but you can batch things so you are fixing several parts of the line at the same time. And if one of those batched fixes was not 100% correct but is re-workable then you can wait another few weeks for the next batch of fixes.

Conversely, if you where producing 50,000 cars per week then rework costs go up and shutting things down quickly to make a minor fix is more viable.