Automotive
This industry group comprises establishments primarily engaged in (1) manufacturing complete automobiles, light duty motor vehicles, and heavy duty trucks (i.e., body and chassis or unibody) or (2) manufacturing motor vehicle chassis only.
Assembly Line
To Build Electric Cars, Jaguar Land Rover Had to Redesign the Factory
The first stage in Halewood’s redevelopment was its new body shop, with two floors separated by 2.5 meters (8 feet) of concrete to account for heavy machinery, capable of producing 500 vehicle bodies per day. The new build line is now in the commissioning stage: pre-production electrified medium-size SUVs are set to be tested through 2025. Forty new autonomous mobile robots now assist Halewood employees with fitting high-voltage batteries. Other additions include a £10 million ($12.9 million) automated painted body storage tower, stacking up to 600 vehicles, retrieved by cranes for just-in-time customer orders.
The plant’s final production line is now also 50 percent longer, with 6 kilometers (3.7 miles) to accommodate battery fitting. All-electric vehicles will be produced in parallel with JLR plug-in hybrids, like the Land Rover Discovery Sport and Range Rover Evoque, and its internal combustion engines. Traditionally, petrol cars are built around the engine, with full-vehicle length components: a drive shaft, fuel lines, and exhaust systems. But electric vehicles have a very different build, says Ford. “The battery goes in much later during the production process—electric drive units go onto front and rear subframes, with a large battery in the middle. That’s why we had to expand our production line, spread the process out, and keep our battery electric vehicles separate.”
Want to design the car of the future? Here are 8,000 designs to get you started.
Car design is an iterative and proprietary process. Carmakers can spend several years on the design phase for a car, tweaking 3D forms in simulations before building out the most promising designs for physical testing. The details and specs of these tests, including the aerodynamics of a given car design, are typically not made public. Significant advances in performance, such as in fuel efficiency or electric vehicle range, can therefore be slow and siloed from company to company.
But now, the engineers have made just such a dataset available to the public for the first time. Dubbed DrivAerNet++, the dataset encompasses more than 8,000 car designs, which the engineers generated based on the most common types of cars in the world. Each design is represented in 3D form and includes information on the car’s aerodynamics — the way air would flow around a given design, based on simulations of fluid dynamics that the group carried out for each design.
Each of the dataset’s 8,000 designs is available in several representations, such as mesh, point cloud, or a simple list of the design’s parameters and dimensions. As such, the dataset can be used by different AI models that are tuned to process data in a particular modality.
DrivAerNet++ is the largest open-source dataset for car aerodynamics that has been developed to date. The engineers envision it being used as an extensive library of realistic car designs, with detailed aerodynamics data that can be used to quickly train any AI model. These models can then just as quickly generate novel designs that could potentially lead to more fuel-efficient cars and electric vehicles with longer range, in a fraction of the time that it takes the automotive industry.
Using AI to Transform Part and Mold Manufacturing
Atomic Industries, based in Warren, Michigan, already has over a dozen customers embracing Atomic’s mission to use cutting-edge digital manufacturing tools to make the best molds possible — faster and more inexpensively.
It starts with AI-designed molds with features optimized for each part. To achieve this, Atomic has partnered with LS Mtron, which has outfitted the injection molding machines (IMM) Atomic uses with 46 I/O ports to capture and leverage a wealth of process data.
“Our long-term vision is to use this technology to change the way parts are made — because ultimately, the most important part of widget production is the mold. Our goal is to commoditize the mold-building process, so when we quote a project we’ll only be quoting a part price — the cost of the mold will be rolled into that cost,” Atomic co-founder Lou Young says.
“In the industry now, when an automaker is kicking off an A-pillar, they have 20 or 30 people around the room going, ‘Here’s where we want the gates’ for one little plastic part. And the car has thousands of plastic parts in it. The AI-designed injection mold we’re building is going to have the best gate location possible for that part and the best waterline design. You won’t need 30 people sitting around a table to ensure it runs right. It’s just going to run right. That mindset will start to shift, says Young.
Hyundai’s Wearable Robotic Shoulder Coming To A Mechanic Near You
Developed by Hyundai and Kia’s Robotics LAB, the X-ble Shoulder isn’t just another gimmicky piece of tech. It’s designed to actively assist workers who have their arms raised for extended periods, reducing shoulder load by up to 60%. For the anatomy enthusiasts, it also reduces anterior and lateral deltoid muscle activation by up to 30%. In other words, it lightens the load both literally and figuratively.
What’s really impressive here is the muscle compensation module that drives the X-ble Shoulder. This clever piece of tech can perform an astounding 700,000 folding and unfolding actions per year, so it’s built for endurance, not just a one-off task.
Obviously, no one’s going to want to work in a hulking exoskeleton all day, so Hyundai has ensured that this device won’t weigh you down. The X-ble Shoulder weighs in at just 1.9 kg (4.1 lbs), thanks to its carbon composite construction. It’s lightweight, adjustable, and designed to fit snugly without feeling like a straitjacket. It comes in two variants: the basic version offers up to 2.9 kgf of assistive force and is best for tasks where posture isn’t fixed, while the adjustable version delivers 3.7 kgf for those needing a bit more muscle.
And Hyundai’s not stopping at the shoulder. The Korean company is also working on an X-ble Waist to assist with lifting heavy loads and reduce back injuries, as well as an X-ble MEX, designed for the rehabilitation of the walking impaired. So, it looks like the future of wearable robots could be a lot more comprehensive than just helping you lift that engine block.
Automotive Stamping Line Is Fast and Flexible
Toyota Motor Manufacturing France (TMMF) integrates many of the processes needed to manufacture a vehicle, from stamping to final assembly. Bumpers, dashboards and plastic trim parts are produced on site. Key components such as seats and roof linings are assembled less than 18 miles from the site. The wheels and windshields are produced at the same business park, and many other parts come from suppliers located in the region. In fact, the Yaris Cross has earned Origine France Garantie certification, meaning at least 50 percent of the unit cost price of the vehicle has been acquired in France.
The press shop produces 87 different parts and is one of the most impressive parts of the plant. It’s made up of four stamping presses and two cutting lines, which transform steel coils into body parts. The largest press weighs 1,567 tons and is 46 meters long. It can exert a maximum force of 4,600 tons on cold steel, 80 percent of which is produced in France.
Despite their size, the presses are fast and precise, stamping out 17 million parts annually with an accuracy of ±0.1 millimeter. A hair or a grain of dust in the die is enough to cause a defect on a part. The stamping operation consumes 300 tons of steel per day. One of the stamping lines was designed and built by AP&T Group of Ulricehamn, Sweden, in 2019.
The equipment consists of a shuttle system that receives parts from an existing transfer line and a SpeedFeeder with a servo-driven gripper for fully automatic changeover between different products. The SpeedFeeder takes parts from the shuttle system and stacks them in a fully automated pallet system. The equipment was delivered complete with a line and safety integration. The press runs at 25 strokes per minute; dual parts are produced at 23 strokes per minute. The cycle time puts high demands on the equipment. The short cycle time was not the only challenge posed by the project. More than 30 different parts are manufactured in the line, and changeover from one product to another must be fast. A gripper change may not take more than 180 seconds.
The body shop is the most automated part of the assembly plant. Some 98 percent of the body-in-white line is automated with 600 robots. At certain stations, up to 12 robots work simultaneously around the same body. Painting is the longest step. In fact, half the production time for each vehicle is for painting. Each vehicle receives three coats of paint: a primer, the base color (a water-based paint), and a clear varnish. The workshop has 12 solid colors and 19 two-tone colors. To limit the environmental impact and waste, the robots are equipped with cartridges containing just the right amount of paint, a system patented by Toyota.
When it arrives at final assembly, the Yaris is just an empty shell, but it will leave as a finished vehicle, complete with wire harnesses, hoses, brakes, engine, windows, bumpers, wheels, seats, steering wheel, and other components. There are around 3,000 components to assemble on each vehicle. The assembly line is equipped with 1,450 screwdrivers that install 1.4 million screws daily.
Introducing Industrial Wearable Robot 'X-ble Shoulder' | Hyundai Motor Group
Automating the manufacturing process of control cables for the automotive components industry
The automotive industry is of great importance to the global economy for all the jobs it generates, the materials it exploits, or the technical and technological development it drives. The control cables provide essential functions for any car, such as the opening of doors and windows, or activating the handbrake and accelerator. The process of assembling control cables involves numerous steps and the manufacture of various components, e.g., the spiral, inner and outer coating, spiral terminal, and terminals. This work deals with the injection process of control cable terminals. There is a need to separate the injection set into its constituent parts, namely the terminals and the feeding system (gate), which is carried out manually, potentially leading to health problems, e.g., tendonitis. This paper presents the development of an automated pneumatic system for the separation of control cable terminals from the feeding system. The novel pneumatic system addresses a significant gap in the automation of Zamak terminal injection by handling seven different terminal types under strict spatial limitations. The automated solution resulted in a 39% reduction in production time, enhancing the process efficiency. Moreover, by adopting the Design Science Research (DSR) methodology, the work contributes not only to industrial practice but also to the theoretical understanding of the process. This approach to automating a repetitive and ergonomically challenging task represents a step forward in the field of manufacturing technology that can be extended to other fabrication processes, leading to process improvements and competitiveness.
Mixed-Model Lines Enable Multiple Power Train Configurations
Mixed-model automotive assembly plants must have the workstations, tools and components necessary to efficiently build hybrids in the same facility as electric and internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles. However, assembling cars with different power trains is much harder than making multiple types of pens, syringes or toothbrushes on the same assembly line. Mixed-model assembly lines typically also need to be laid out differently than lines that only produce one type of vehicle.
“Mixed-model assembly is used regularly across industries, most notably the discrete electronics industry where products such as smart phones with multiple form factors and internal configurations are manufactured,” notes Khalid Sebti, executive vice president and managing director of Capgemini Engineering. “Use in the auto industry is different, but not necessarily more complex, due to designs shifting to multi-use platforms to accommodate different power train options.
One complex problem that Porsche had to solve involved fastening. The marriage of a gas or hybrid vehicle requires the underbody and chassis to be screwed together in 20 places. However, in the all-electric variant, there are 50 joints that need to be tightened. Porsche engineers developed an automatic screw loading system that, depending on the product line and fittings, can handle any screw size and shape, torque and angle at high speeds. A measuring device regularly passes along the assembly line to check the screw spindles during ongoing production operations. As a result, there are virtually no idle times or delays.
HENN: Improved production quality helps protect automotive brands
Automotive parts manufacturer HENN needed an improved data architecture that would allow it to gain real-time insight into its assembly line process, The primary goal was to improve the quality of its charged air connector, which is a critical car component and used by most major automotive brands. If it were to fail, significant damage to the car manufacturer’s brand could result. HENN sought to meet this challenge in a unique way by using CONNECT and Edge Data Store.
Prior to deploying CONNECT, it took HENN’s team two days to validate the production line data. Now, analysts can retrieve data from the cloud two minutes after a connector leaves the machine, and they can run inquiries against large data sets without impacting operations. This improved data processing speed helped increase the efficiency of HENN’s operations and the quality control of its product, thereby improving the reliability of the automotive brands that purchase HENN’s products.
Honda Outlines Key Production Processes Behind New Line of EVs
Honda 0 Series is the automaker’s new approach to electric vehicle development, which is focusing on the theme of “thin, light and wise.” The goal of the R&D project is to minimize battery size while providing sufficient cruising range and a nimble driving experience that transcends the existing image of EVs.
Honda engineers are focusing their efforts on four core production technologies, including megacasting and friction stir welding. Megacasting involves molding large cast parts such as one-piece battery enclosures that eliminate seams. A new battery case, which traditionally consists of more than 60 parts, has been reduced to only five parts, making it possible to produce a high-quality, thin and light enclosure.
3D Friction Stir Welding (FSW) is being applied to two processes in the manufacturing of battery cases. The first is the process of joining parts made by megacasting to form the case enclosure, and the second is the process of joining the water jacket cover, which is necessary to provide the battery with cooling. The technology uses only the frictional heat between the rotating rod-shaped tool and the joint to soften and join the aluminum parts.
Mercedes-Benz opens own recycling factory to close the battery loop
Mercedes-Benz opened Europe’s first battery recycling plant with an integrated mechanical-hydrometallurgical process making it the first car manufacturer worldwide1 to close the battery recycling loop with its own in-house facility. The recycling plant in Kuppenheim, southern Germany, creates a genuine circular economy. This underpins the pioneering spirit and innovative strength of Mercedes-Benz as it strives to significantly reduce the consumption of valuable primary resources. Unlike existing established processes, the expected recovery rate of the mechanical-hydrometallurgical recycling plant is more than 96 percent. Valuable and scarce raw materials such as lithium, nickel and cobalt can be recovered – in a way which is suitable for use in new batteries for future all-electric Mercedes-Benz vehicles. The company has invested tens of millions of euros in the construction of the new battery recycling plant and thus in the value creation in Germany. Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Baden-Württemberg’s Environment Minister Thekla Walker visited the plant for the opening ceremony in Kuppenheim, Baden.
Hyundai’s Controversial Alabama Plant Is Now Driving Its US Growth
Hyundai’s most productive car plant sits on a former cotton plantation on the southern edge of Montgomery, Alabama, where it pumps out Tucson crossovers, Santa Fe SUVs and other models on three shifts, 24 hours a day, sometimes seven days a week.
The Montgomery facility, which has become a model for other factories around the world, boasts one of the lowest ratios of workers per vehicle anywhere — about half that of its mother plant in South Korea. During a recent visit by Bloomberg, robots abounded and few workers were visible outside the confines of the final assembly line.
Hyundai proudly calls Montgomery “the birthplace of high productivity.” Nearly 500 robots are used on its assembly lines, speeding up production to one vehicle every 16 hours. That’s faster than the industry average, which can take up to 35 hours, according to JVIS-USA LLC.
“The plant is more automated than most, certainly in North America,” said Ron Harbour, former senior partner at Oliver Wyman and leading expert on manufacturing efficiency, noting that Hyundai also has gone to great lengths to minimize worker downtime. “So when you combine that with the automation, then they’ve always been one of the most productive.”
The high levels of reliance on Hyundai’s own industrial conglomerate, or chaebol, is another enduring source of tension. Rolled steel coils used to stamp out body panels are supplied by Hyundai Steel Co. Industrial robots painted bright yellow bear the logo of HD Hyundai Robotics. Bundles of components forming easy-to-install modules are provided around-the-clock by Hyundai Mobis Co. Shipper Hyundai Glovis Co. delivers many components and finished cars.
How do you produce three drive types on a single assembly line?
This is what’s called the marriage. Wherever vehicles are manufactured, this is the centerpiece of production. So far, so good. But the marriage at the Porsche Plant Leipzig is special. Unusually complex, multifaceted, and efficient. Three different drive concepts are manufactured on a single production line: gasoline-driven, hybrid, and electric vehicles. Some 600 Macan and Panamera cars are produced in top quality in this way every day, for customers around the world.
One especially complex problem: whereas the marriage of a gasoline-driven or hybrid vehicle involves the vehicle’s underbody and chassis being screwed together in 20 places, there are 50 in an all-electric model. While this change may seem unspectacular at first, it involved the major challenge of handling these additional work steps on one and the same assembly line.
To solve this problem, Sebastian Böttcher and his team had to reinvent the marriage. What was previously four assembly stations stretching across 24 meters became nine stations across 60 meters. Six additional robots and 18 automatic screw stations were incorporated.
Panasonic Connect North America Launches Syncora Digital Manufacturing Platform to Spur Electric Vehicle Battery Manufacturing Growth in the U.S.
Panasonic Connect North America announced the launch of Syncora Digital Manufacturing Platform (SyncoraDMP), an end-to-end manufacturing execution system (MES) solution designed to accelerate digital transformation of EV battery manufacturing in the U.S. SyncoraDMP is modular, scalable, and adaptable to enable manufacturers to keep up with the requirements of EV battery manufacturing. With comprehensive traceability, quality management, process monitoring, and advanced analytics and reporting, manufacturers can optimize production and deliver product faster and more efficiently.
End-to-End Process Orchestration for Optimal Production: SyncoraDMP gives manufacturers the ability to automatically track, trace, and control end-to-end production. It simplifies integration into upstream enterprise systems such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) and product lifecycle management (PLM), while also connecting to supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) and machine-level data for monitoring and control. This improves the manufacturing process to increase product quality standards and minimize returns.
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Ford harnesses Formlabs SLA & SLS 3D printing technology to prototype Electric Explorer vehicle parts
Ford was one of the first beta users of Formlabs’ Form 4, deploying the technology at its Ford Cologne facilities in Germany, where its engineers also have access to a Form 3L and Fuse 1+ 30W machine.
Among the parts to be prototyped with Formlabs 3D printing technology are a complex charging port, a cover for the charging port, a rearview mirror assembly, dashboard parts and exterior features. The company also 3D printed insert moulds for the injection moulding of two rubber components, required in the door handle design for their damping and insulation capabilities.
Having achieved this success with prototyping, Ford engineers also sought to combine the capabilities of 3D printing with injection moulding to produce crash test parts. These components must be made from the same material and process as in mass production, meaning the parts were always going to be manufactured with injection moulding. Ford saw the potential, however, in leveraging 3D printing for rapid tooling, producing the mould inserts for the rubber door handle assembly parts in weeks rather than months.
Electrolysis helps resolve battery production’s waste issue
Sodium sulphate is a by-product resulting from the use of sulfuric acid and caustic soda during the refinement of critical metals for manufacturing common cathodes, including nickel-manganese-cobalt. It is also created during battery recycling—the Argonne National Lab’s EverBatt model estimates that 800kg is produced per 1,000kg of battery materials processed. Sodium sulphate does have limited commercial use, but the uptick in EV battery production means that responsibly disposing of greater quantities becomes difficult.
The potential for cleaner electrified chemical processing, Hackl adds, has “massive” potential. “There are many different ways to approach this in automotive—from green hydrogen to carbon capture—but we wanted to pick the area that addressed the actual problems of suppliers today.” As such, in 2021, Hackl and Akuzum co-founded Aepnus Technology—as Chief Executive and Chief Technology Officer, respectively—to reduce emissions in battery supply chain chemicals through ultra-efficient electrolysis.
Aepnus Technology’s solution was to develop a new electrolyser—a stack of metal electrodes separated by membranes and fed aqueous feedstocks, which are then turned into desired chemical products through the application of electricity. “This is how we can take sodium sulphate and transform it back into the two chemical reagent workhorses of the battery industry: sulfuric acid and caustic soda,” explains Hackl. Essentially, the company takes what was formerly a waste product bound for landfill and reintroduces its constituent parts to the supply chain.
A Chinese Company Just ‘Gigacast’ An Entire Underbody
Chinese automaker Chery Auto has cast an entire underbody using a 13,000-ton dual-injection press. Huge castings are amazing when they’re warranted. Subframes, suspension arms, drive motor housings, hubs, dashboard support structures, seat frames, if it bolts on, you name it. However, casting an entire underbody in one go seems like a process with downsides for consumers. A car is the second-most expensive thing you’ll buy in your life, so let’s keep them repairable.
It may be that significant R&D was required to get the die design to flow the metal just right without porosity or early solidification. Chery may not want anyone to see flow patterns in the casting that might teach them something. Alternatively, maybe they’re just hiding the geometry of the final part due to its relevance to their upcoming models. Or maybe these castings are full of defects and they’re hiding the evidence? That’s a long shot, though. Why would they boast if they can’t make the castings work?
Improving the Quality and Speed of Alloy Die Casting Products in the Auto Sector
The implementation of Creaform’s technology into Shanghai Meridian’s production processes was remarkably smooth. The shift from a legacy system to the MetraSCAN 3D’s intuitive interface and ergonomic handling allowed for quick onboarding and simplified, hassle-free remote collaboration across different teams and regions.
With the enhanced capability of real-time display during the 3D scanning process, the team could control and adjust tooling instantly, leading to substantial savings in time and labor, which enabled Shanghai Meridian to remain competitive on a global scale.
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BYD Revolutionizes Battery Production Line with ForwardX Robotics' AMR Solutions
BYD, renowned for its electric vehicle and sustainable technology innovations, embarks on a transformative collaboration with ForwardX Robotics, a global leader in autonomous mobile robots (AMRs). This partnership has introduced groundbreaking automation solutions into BYD’s advanced battery production line, signaling a shift towards enhanced efficiency and eco-friendly manufacturing.
Responding to the escalating demand for electric vehicle batteries, BYD has revolutionized its production approach by integrating ForwardX Robotics’ AMRs and custom autonomous forklifts. This strategic move veers from labor-intensive methods, which are costly and inadequate for meeting rapid industry growth. At BYD’s facility, nine units of ForwardX Robotics’ Max 1500-L Slim AMRs and six units of Apex 2000 Autonomous forklifts with 2.4-meter fork lengths operate across a vast area of 15,000 to 16,000 square meters. These AMRs and forklifts collaborate seamlessly to optimize material transport and streamline production workflows.
More integration of components: The story behind AISIN's 'X-in-1' eAxle
“X-in-1” is the generic term for an eAxle that combines multiple components or functions into one, where “X” indicates the number of integrated components. For example, when five components are integrated, it is called a “5-in-1” eAxle; when eight components are integrated, it’s an “8-in-1” eAxle, and so on.
The current mainstream eAxle is a combination of inverter, gearbox and motor. This is called a “3-in-1” eAxle. Aisin is developing a 3-in-1 eAxle based on a three-generation concept. The first-generation eAxle has already been mass-produced and is used in Toyota’s bZ4X and other electric vehicles. We aim to achieve the world’s highest level of efficiency in the second-generation eAxle, which is scheduled to be introduced in 2025 to help strengthen a full product lineup. The third-generation eAxle is aimed at achieving overwhelming miniaturization, reducing the overall size by 50 percent of the first generation.
TELO Announces $5.4M Strategic Fundraise Led by Neo to Continue Building the Most Efficient Electric Truck
TELO, the company redefining the footprint and functionality of electric mobility with its innovative EV mini-truck, announced its $5.4M strategic funding round led by Neo, with additional investment from Spero Ventures and angel investors. The closing of this strategic raise signifies TELO’s continued business growth.
Coinciding with this announcement, TELO is pleased to appoint Marc Tarpenning, co-founder of Tesla, to the company’s board this month. Tarpenning’s board appointment is an incredibly exciting moment in TELO’s growth story as he will help guide the team in their final stages of TELO’s development. Also, as a Spero Ventures partner, Tarpenning participated in the just announced strategic funding round. This infusion of funds will be used to continue the virtual validation of the vehicle’s safety and also the development of a road-ready model.
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Point2 Tech Secures $23 Million Series B Boost from Bosch Ventures and Molex to Revolutionize Multi-Terabit Interconnect for AI and Automotive
Point2 Technology, a leading provider of ultra-low-power, low-latency mixed-signal SoC solutions for multi-terabit interconnect, announced a $22.6 million Series B extension from Bosch Ventures, a leader in deep tech investments, and Molex, a global electronics leader and connectivity innovator, with participation from other investors. This Series B extension validates the demand for Point2’s technology in AI/ML data center applications and the potential to disrupt network interconnect in the broad automotive sector.
Point2 is also partnering with Molex, a strategic investor, to commercialize its E-Tube technology, a scalable interconnect platform that uses RF data transmission over plastic dielectric waveguide to enable multi-terabit active cables with 80% lower weight and 50% less bulk than copper cables. Compared to optical cables, E-Tube is expected to reduce power consumption and costs by 50%, with picosecond latencies that are three orders of magnitude better. Shattering the “copper or optics” paradigm for high-speed cable interconnect, E-Tube breaks the barriers of copper and optical cabling and is poised to become the next-generation multi-terabit interconnect technology.
Battery Plant Scrap Rates Can Hit 90% At Ramp Up, But The Situation Is Improving
“What we’re seeing, especially in first-year yields, is dismal, tiny. In some cases, just 10% to 20% of production is usable,” said Dr. Tal Sholklapper, a co-founder of the Voltaiq startup, which uses analytics to comb through data and advise battery companies on improving those yields.
Eli Leland, chief technology officer and Voltaiq’s co-founder, told Autoweek, the problems happen when a line is cranked up “and you’re making thousands of cells a day, and throwing most of them away.” According to Voltaiq, reducing scrap rates by just one percentage point can mean tens of millions in added profit annually. The company calls its process of AI-aided data collection, analysis, and interpretation of the charge-discharge cycle Enterprise Battery Intelligence.
Mech-Mind AI + 3D Vision-Guided Applications in Automotive Industry
Figure announces commercial agreement with BMW Manufacturing to bring general purpose robots into automotive production
Figure, a California-based company developing autonomous humanoid robots, announced that it has signed a commercial agreement with BMW Manufacturing Co., LLC to deploy general purpose robots in automotive manufacturing environments.
Under the agreement, BMW Manufacturing and Figure will pursue a milestone-based approach. In the first phase, Figure will identify initial use cases to apply the Figure robots in automotive production. Once the first phase has been completed, the Figure robots will begin staged deployment at BMW’s manufacturing facility in Spartanburg, South Carolina.
Toyota Motor Corporation Collaborates with READY Robotics to Introduce Sim-to-Real Robotic Programming in Industrial Manufacturing Using NVIDIA Omniverse
READY Robotics, a pioneer in operating systems for automation and robotics, is collaborating with Toyota Motor Corporation and NVIDIA to bring a significant leap forward in industrial robotics. Toyota will employ READY ForgeOS in tandem with NVIDIA Isaac Sim, a robotics simulator developed on NVIDIA Omniverse, to build a state-of-the-art simulated robotic programming environment for its aluminum hot forging production lines.
This groundbreaking collaboration is set to enhance safety and efficiency in Toyota’s manufacturing processes. Typically, programming robotic systems for forging necessitates that the metal parts remain hot during programming, presenting significant safety challenges. By integrating NVIDIA Isaac Sim — an extensible application developed on the Omniverse platform for simulating, developing and testing robots — with ForgeOS, programming can now be accomplished seamlessly in a simulated environment, eliminating the risks associated with hot parts.
GM takes 3D printing to new heights with Cadillac CELESTIQ
The Cadillac CELESTIQ integrates 115 metal and polymer 3D printed components, including a metal laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) steering wheel, 3D printed window switches, grab handles, decorative parts, and structural seatbelt D-rings, which holds the title of being GM’s first 3D printed safety-related part. It’s no surprise that the new low-volume vehicle represents the broadest integration of 3D printed production parts for GM. And we wanted to understand how the company got there; how it has pursued AM so successfully and where it’s going with the technology.
While GM uses a wide array of additive processes across its business, there are a few specific processes that have really excelled for the company’s production applications: metal binder jetting, metal LPBF, and HP’s Multi Jet Fusion.
Robots Are Looking Better to Detroit as Labor Costs Rise
Tesla has been a leader in factory robotization, putting pressure on competitors to follow suit. Last year, executives at the world’s most valuable automaker said introducing more automated equipment was a crucial tool in its goal to cut the cost of making future models by 50%.
Dozens of new battery factories and electric-vehicle plants in the works will also open the door to broader use of high-tech systems, analysts say. It is easier and less costly to install robots in a new facility versus retrofitting an existing one. Plus, it is more streamlined to have updated systems that “speak” to each other smoothly, as opposed to popping in a new machine among older ones.
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Toyota Outlines Future Production Processes
The new strategy is rooted in the basic principles of the Toyota Production System (TPS), which includes a willingness to do things “for the benefit of someone other than yourself” and a “human-centered” approach to manufacturing. “What caught my attention the most was seeing see the famous genchi genbutsu (real place, real facts) now being done via video,” notes Obara. “Toyota engineers designed a vest to hold a camera, so remote people would not need to be on site to see it all.”
Toyota’s next-generation EVs will be built upon a new modular structure in which car bodies are divided into three sections: front, center and rear. The center section will house solid-state batteries, which offer faster charging and longer range than conventional batteries. Giga-casting is one of the new production technologies that will make these modular structures possible. Currently, the rear section of the Toyota bZ4X EV is made with 86 sheet metal parts and 33 press processes.
“Whereas a typical changeover might take 24 hours and require a large crane, giga-casting molds, which weigh more than 100 tons, leads to even greater time loss,” says Shingo. “Our new approach to giga casting divides molds into two types: general-purpose molds that remain mounted on the machinery and specialized molds whose shape differs by car model. During a replacement, only the compact specialized molds detach themselves automatically from the general-purpose molds.” With these just-in-time mold changes—replacing only what is needed, when it is needed, in the quantity needed—Toyota is aiming to bring lead times down to 20 minutes or less.
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Automakers and suppliers have a failure-to-launch problem. How can they fix it?
Over the last four years, there’s been a steady increase in new-model auto launch delays in North America. These delays, caused in part by the pandemic, have also stemmed from numerous challenges surrounding electric vehicle (EV) development and other factors, including pervasive production and supply chain issues. The result has been costly for both original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and suppliers. According to a PwC analysis, a single 12-month delay can cost an OEM up to $200 million and cost a supplier $15 million. Our analysis, however, does suggest a slight slowing in the rate of delays in 2023. Looking ahead, our analysis suggests that the number of planned launches is estimated to nearly double through 2026 from 2023 levels.
There can be myriad causes for launch delays. They typically occur because of insufficient risk-mitigation planning at the beginning of a product development and production project as well as late detection of problem areas and a slow response to address them. Early-stage missteps, then, can lead to later-stage issues and unrecoverable cost overruns.
So, as OEMs plan new model launches (and especially EV launches), many could benefit by reassessing (or even recalibrating) traditional approaches to design and production and how they work with their supplier networks.
Secondmind expands strategic partnership with Mazda to accelerate vehicle design and development through advanced AI
Secondmind announced today the expansion of its long-standing strategic partnership with Mazda to drive AI-fueled innovations that address the increasing engineering complexity in automotive design and development. The extended partnership centers around R&D and the commercial deployment of solutions that support systems engineering and validation processes, with the goal of unlocking time and cost efficiencies through increased virtualization in design and development, and a sharp focus on strategic applications with high complexity barriers to overcome.
As a key element of the expanded relationship, Mazda joined a new $16 million funding round in Secondmind alongside existing Secondmind investors Amadeus Capital, Atlantic Bridge Ventures, and Cambridge Innovation Capital, signalling strong support for Secondmind leadership, innovative Active Learning technology, product differentiation, and the company’s opportunity in the automotive sector.
Collaborating for the World's First 5.5G URLLC Production Line
Inside Hyundai’s new sci-fi smart factory
The Hyundai Motor Group Innovation Center Singapore (HMGICS, for short) isn’t just a firmware update of the traditional assembly line – it’s a futuristic (and mildly terrifying) look at our increasingly roboticized, AI-driven future. While Boston Dynamics’ Spot robot trots around to approve vehicles, a full digital twin of the factory floor runs simulations showing how the space can be better optimized. But arguably the most interesting thing is that you can order a new car at Hyundai’s plant and drive it away on the same day.
“This isn’t like a traditional production plant,” explains VP and Head of Smart Factory Technology, Alpesh Patel. “We plan to produce around 70 cars a day here, so it’s no mass production line, but that’s not the point. The speed at which we can react to customer personalization demands and cater to bespoke project requirements is like little else,” he adds. Patel claims that is can take as little as three hours to go from a customer ordering a vehicle to driving it away, thanks to the unique set-up of the highly automated cell-based production process.
Just a handful of highly skilled operatives work with walls of screens that can pull up a wealth of smart factory data, checking in on efficiency levels of each production cell and predicting when a robot requires servicing or a part needs to be ordered long before the need arises. A separate section of the room features a full digital twin of the factory floor (a meta factory, as it is referred to), which can run simulations when new production requirements arise. Patel claims that currently, staff in the Digital Command Centre are integral to the operation, but he states that AI will soon step up and begin taking care of most of the day-to-day functionality.
🇨🇳 Ambarella CEO: ‘Chinese OEMs Are Copying the Tesla Model’
Ambarella CEO Fermi Wang clarified to EE Times that revenue for Ambarella’s most recent CV3 automotive SoC family will come first, but not only, from China. “The reason is that Chinese OEMs and tier ones will take only 18-24 months to introduce a product versus 48 months anywhere else,” Wang told EE Times. “At IAA, German OEMs were shocked by how fast Chinese vendors have been able to [develop and] show EVs.” Chinese automotive OEMs move a lot faster than their European and American counterparts, according to Wang.
“From the development cycle point of view, Chinese companies are focused on getting things out quicker instead of the European approach to make sure everything is there, quality-wise, before it’s shipped, [though] we haven’t seen a quality issue so far,” he said. “The Chinese are copying the Tesla model [upgrading software over the air] rather than the German model.”
Optimizing factory planning in the automotive industry
Factory planning in the automotive industry presents a multifaceted endeavor with numerous complexities. Some of the most prominent factors that demand careful attention are factory layout optimization, space constraints, and adapting to the paradigm shift toward Electric Vehicles (EVs).
Efficient factory layout design is crucial for enhancing production efficiency, reducing material movement, and ensuring a safe, ergonomic work environment. Achieving this optimization can be intricate, demanding careful consideration of equipment placement and manufacturing process.
Canoo takes it one vehicle at a time
The first vehicles assembled at Canoo’s manufacturing facility were on display Wednesday inside its 630,000-square-foot plant as part of a batch in an agreement for up to 1,000 vehicles with the state of Oklahoma. In August 2022, Canoo announced an agreement with Walmart for 4,500 vehicles. Also last year, the U.S. Army awarded Canoo a contract to test its pickup truck.
In August, the company announced it signed agreements on incentives with the state for its vehicle assembly facility in Oklahoma City and a battery module manufacturing plant in Pryor with a combined value of up to $113 million for 10 years. The agreement has multiple benchmarks Canoo must meet to receive the funds. The battery plant and the assembly facility will bring more 1,300 jobs, according to a release.
How China's BYD went from bargain battery maker to Tesla's biggest rival
Outside China, the world’s largest EV market where it is the undisputed champion, in several months this year, BYD claimed the throne of bestselling EV in Thailand, Sweden, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Israel and Brazil.
Toyota takes on Tesla’s gigacasting in battle for carmaking’s future
Some car executives and analysts expect Tesla’s process — which Musk calls “gigacasting” — to set a new benchmark for building vehicles, replacing the vaunted Toyota Production System based on just-in-time manufacturing efficiency. The way Tesla is making cars “is quickly moving to become an industry standard”, said one senior executive at a European automaker.
For the moment, Toyota says it wants more than half of its 2030 sales target to be made up of EVs using its new modular architecture, which allows it to produce multiple different models, that share key components, on the same platforms. Yuzawa said: “Gigacasting is going to reshape the whole underbody supply chain network.”
Gigacasting: The hottest trend in car manufacturing
Gigacasting is all the rage in automotive manufacturing circles. And while Tesla has mainstreamed the term — involving enormous, high-pressure aluminum die casting machines that punch out vehicle chassis and bodies-in-white — the technology has largely caught on in mainland China. Now other automakers, including Toyota, are eyeing the process.
These massive gigacastings (also known as megacastings) carry huge initial startup costs, may have distortion issues in the metal, alter collision-repair capabilities, and require extensive end-of-line inspection scanning. And that is only after ordering a custom-built gargantuan piece of equipment, moving it into place, and figuring out how to efficiently work the temperamental processes. The cost-benefit analysis of gigacasting should be based on achieving a good-enough first-pass yield rate and maintaining a sufficient, yet not excessive, number of orders for the same part. When comparing gigacasting to conventional steel stamping or aluminum-stitching, S&P Global Mobility nonetheless assesses the unit price for a single-piece, gigacasted aluminum rear floor to be valid.
OEMs are looking towards gigacasting not as a component piece, but as a change to how their entire world functions. The reconfiguration of the dance played behind factory walls will forever change economies within automotive. Whether corner castings or single piece, whether gigacast or gigapress, a change to how vehicles come together is upon the industry. Nodal construction will replace linear, bottlenecks will arise and dissolve, and something altogether new will be born.
Ford, Hyundai test Tesla supplier's Giga Press
Idra, an Italian aluminum casting machine maker and Tesla supplier, has added Ford, Hyundai and another European company to its customer base as more automakers explore this manufacturing technique. Tesla has pioneered the use of massive casting machines, also known as ‘Giga Presses,’ to make large single pieces of vehicle underbodies, streamline production and reduce the work even of robots.
The source said Idra was also about to sign a supply contract for two 9,000 presses with a premium automaker in Europe, its first with a European group. Sources said Volvo has purchased two Idra Giga Presses for their new plant in eastern Europe.
Making Conversation: Using AI to Extract Intel from Industrial Machinery and Equipment
What if your machine could talk? This is the question Ron Di Carlantonio has grappled with since he founded iNAGO 1998. iNAGO was onboard when the Government of Canada supported a lighthouse project led by the Automotive Parts Manufacturers’ Association (APMA) to design, engineer and build a connected and autonomous zero-emissions vehicle (ZEV) concept car and its digital twin that would validate and integrate autonomous technologies. The electric SUV is equipped with a dual-motor powertrain with total output of 550 hp and 472 lb-ft of torque.
The general use of AI-based solutions in the automotive industry stretches across the lifecycle of a vehicle, from design and manufacturing to sales and aftermarket care. AI-powered chatbots, in particular, deliver instant, personalized virtual driver assistance, are on call 27/7 and can evolve with the preferences of tech-savvy drivers. Di Carlantonio now sees an opportunity to extend the use of the intelligent assistant platform to the smart factory by making industrial equipment—CNC machines, presses, conveyors, industrial robots—talk.
🗜️ Tesla reinvents carmaking with quiet breakthrough
The company pioneered the use of huge presses with 6,000 to 9,000 tons of clamping pressure to mold the front and rear structures of its Model Y in a “gigacasting” process that slashed production costs and left rivals scrambling to catch up.
In a bid to extend its lead, Tesla is closing in on an innovation that would allow it to die cast nearly all the complex underbody of an EV in one piece, rather than about 400 parts in a conventional car, the people said. Two of the sources said Tesla’s previously unreported new design and manufacturing techniques meant the company could develop a car from the ground up in 18 to 24 months, while most rivals can currently take anywhere from three to four years. The five people said a single large frame - combining the front and rear sections with the middle underbody where the battery is housed - could be used in Tesla’s small EV which it aims to launch with a price tag of $25,000 by the middle of the decade.
Tesla turned to firms that make test molds out of industrial sand with 3D printers. Using a digital design file, printers known as binder jets deposit a liquid binding agent onto a thin layer of sand and gradually build a mold, layer by layer, that can die cast molten alloys. The aluminium alloys used to produce the castings behaved differently in sand and metal molds and often failed to meet Tesla’s criteria for crashworthiness and other attributes. The casting specialists overcame that by formulating special alloys, fine-tuning the molten alloy cooling process, and also coming up with an after-production heat treatment, three of the sources said. And once Tesla is happy with the prototype mold, it can then invest in a final metal one for mass production.
🔋 Behind the Scenes at Renault’s New Electric Motor Line
Last summer, Renault hit the start button on a new, highly automated line to assemble motors for electric vehicles at its historic factory in Cléon, France.
The plant has a history of deploying Industry 4.0 technologies. In 2020, for example, the facility installed three fully automated machining lines to produce crankshafts, cylinder housings and cylinder heads. Sensors in the connected machines automatically send alerts to maintenance technicians when, for example, they detect an unusual rise in temperature or abnormal vibration on a bearing.
The plant also employs automated guided vehicles, 3D printing, exoskeletons, collaborative robots and virtual reality training. Digital applications on smartphones make everyday life easier for operators.
🔋 The Race for Solid-State Batteries
Solid-state batteries could reshuffle the deck on the market for electric vehicles. Longer ranges, faster charging times, greater safety—solid-state batteries offer numerous advantages for electric cars. Many other applications are also conceivable, such as in aerial taxis, commercial vehicles, and buses, as well as stationary energy storage for renewables. The road to market readiness, however, is by no means clear. Six key tasks need to be solved for a breakthrough in the automotive industry alone: improving product properties, converting existing gigafactories to solid-state production, integrating the batteries into vehicle systems, establishing robust supply chains for new materials, reducing costs by enlarging cell formats, and funding the start-up stage.
While Asian manufacturers like CATL and LG dominate lithium-ion technology, most of the leaders in solid-state battery technology are start-ups in the USA. The established Asian players are not leaving the field without a fight, however. For example, leading cell manufacturers in Korea are forming close partnerships with their suppliers to drive the technology forward. The big carmakers appear to have learned their lesson from lithium-ion batteries. In order to prevent further dependence on Asian suppliers, they have been investing heavily in tech start-ups.
Interesting Engineering on UVeye – The MRI for Cars
Robots Automate Assembly of Auto Parts
AMG is Husco’s in-house factory automation arm. It designs and builds most of the manufacturing lines for Husco, and it recently began offering its services to outside clients as well.
While many manufacturers, including Husco, have been devoting more and more of their efforts to EVs, increasing the efficiency of internal combustion engines remains important. One crucial development has been the use of variable-force solenoids in car and truck engines. These small devices optimize the opening of the valves that let fuel and air into the cylinders at the heart of each engine, helping to increase both fuel efficiency and horsepower.To reach its goal, the plant would have to produce a fully assembled and tested solenoid every 6.1 seconds. To make that possible, the AMG team developed a modular automated assembly system consisting of a pallet-transfer conveyor and 10 Epson SCARA robots for most of the material handling. They settled on one Epson G6, two G3, and seven T-Series systems.
Husco and AMG most often use Epson T-Series robots for pick and place operations, but upgrade to the G-Series when they need higher speed and accuracy.
The Czingers disrupt manufacturing at top speeds — 253 mph, specifically
With a combination of innovative software and 3D metal printing, the Czingers have created a system to radically speed up and streamline the process of making vehicles, and potentially transform the automotive industry. It applies artificial intelligence to develop car parts, and 3D printing to manufacture them.
The Los Angeles-based company’s own Divergent Adaptive Production System (DAPS) was developed by a team that includes engineers formerly from Tesla, Apple, and other tech heavyweights. It’s a complete software-hardware solution designed to replace traditional vehicle manufacturing. With artificial intelligence, it can computationally design any structure, no matter how complex. The system then additively manufactures and assembles these parts, optimizing every component for minimum weight and maximum strength. And it can seamlessly switch from manufacturing cars to drones and beyond.
“That software designs the parts and designs it to be its most efficient and to print in the most effective way on our hardware,” said Lukas Czinger, who majored in electrical engineering as a student at Yale College. “Then it also designs it to be assembled in the lowest possible cycle time while meeting all the requirements of our modular, fully fixtureless assembly process. Those three things together — design software, printing, and assembly — is really what Divergent is.”
Behind the A.I. tech making BMW vehicle assembly more efficient
Chinese scientists say supersized magnesium parts pave the way for cheaper, lighter cars
Researchers in China say they have developed supersized magnesium alloy auto parts that could significantly reduce the cost of making cars and promote lightweight vehicle designs. The scientists produced the two giant parts – a car body and a battery box cover – from a single mould in one casting. Each part measures over 2.2 square metres (23.7 sq ft) – the first of their size to be made from magnesium alloy, according to a news release from the National Engineering Research Centre for Magnesium Alloys (CCMg) at Chongqing University on June 27.
Chongqing Millison Technologies provided the die casting system used for processing, while Boao Aluminium Manufacturing has experience in developing magnesium alloy dashboard and seat frames. They used high-pressure casting to create the two parts using a technology similar to Tesla’s “gigacasting” process. It involves injecting molten metal into a steel mould and filling it under high pressure before cooling.
🧠 Toyota Research Institute Unveils New Generative AI Technique for Vehicle Design
Toyota Research Institute (TRI) today unveiled a generative artificial intelligence (AI) technique to amplify vehicle designers. Currently, designers can leverage publicly available text-to-image generative AI tools as an early step in their creative process. With TRI’s new technique, designers can add initial design sketches and engineering constraints into this process, cutting down the iterations needed to reconcile design and engineering considerations.
TRI researchers released two papers describing how the technique incorporates precise engineering constraints into the design process. Constraints like drag (which affects fuel efficiency) and chassis dimensions like ride height and cabin dimensions (which affect handling, ergonomics, and safety) can now be implicitly incorporated into the generative AI process. The team tied principles from optimization theory, used extensively for computer-aided engineering, to text-to-image-based generative AI. The resulting algorithm allows the designer to optimize engineering constraints while maintaining their text-based stylistic prompts to the generative AI process.
🚗 Using RFID Databolts in an Engine Assembly Plant
There are many types of RFID processors and network protocols to keep in mind as you’re installing your RFID system in your automotive plant manufacturing line. This blog post focuses on RFID databolts. I’ll discuss best practices for installing them, how to use RFID technology to track engine parts and components throughout the production process and how to use RFID databolts to provide instructions and to document the finished process.
The RFID databolt is a threaded device that can be embedded into a blank engine block or other component prior to production. It includes a radio-frequency identification (RFID) tag, a microprocessor, RFID antenna, and a power source, such as a battery or a connection to a power supply.
🚙🔌 General Motors Doubles Down on Commitment to a Unified Charging Standard and Expands Charging Access to Tesla Supercharger Network
General Motors Co. (NYSE: GM) announced today a collaboration with Tesla to integrate the North American Charging Standard (NACS) connector design into its EVs beginning in 2025. Additionally, the collaboration will expand access to charging for GM EV drivers at 12,000 Tesla Superchargers, and growing, throughout North America. This agreement complements GM’s ongoing investments in charging, reinforcing the company’s focus on expanding charging access across home, workplace, and public spaces and builds on the more than 134,000 chargers available to GM EV drivers today through the company’s Ultium Charge 360 initiative and mobile apps.
The Tesla Supercharger Network will be open to GM EV drivers starting in 2024 and will initially require the use of an adapter. Beginning in 2025, the first GM EVs will be built with a NACS inlet for direct access to Tesla Superchargers without an adapter. In the future, GM will make adapters available for drivers of NACS-enabled vehicles to allow charging on CCS-capable fast charge stations.
🦾 Renault Retrofits Robots at Refactory
The robots that retired from Renault’s plants in Sandouville, France, Maubeuge, France, and Douai are sent to the retrofit unit, which is run by Francesetti Nathalie, head of the tooling department at the plant. In the past, each plant retrofitted its own machines. Now, the Refactory revamps them all so the automaker can reap the benefit of a specialist team pooling their expertise in a dedicated workshop. By 2023, the team will double in size and have eight technicians and a scheduler.
By retrofitting robots, Renault has reduced investments in new projects and repair costs. This operation has also shortened supply chains, which are getting longer and longer for new robots. Ultimately, Renault’s goal is to retrofit more than 170 robots per year to support the company’s shift to producing electric vehicles. The operation will save the automaker some 3 million euros per year.
🚙🏭 Tesla Rethinks the Assembly Line
Engineers at Tesla Inc. have developed a new process that they claim will reduce EV production costs by 50 percent, while reducing factory space by 40 percent. The “unboxed” system was outlined during the automaker’s recent Investor Day event at its new factory in Austin, TX. Tesla believes that its more efficient production method will lead to a paradigm shift in the way that vehicles are mass-produced. It focuses on eliminating linear assembly lines and producing more subassemblies out of large castings.
“The traditional way of making a vehicle is to stamp it, build a body-in-white, paint it and do final assembly,” says Lars Moravy, vice president of vehicle engineering at Tesla. “These individual shops are dictated by the boundaries that exist in auto factories. If something goes wrong in final assembly, you block the whole line and you end up with buffering in between.”
“We simplified Model Y assembly with a structural battery, where the battery is [also] the floor,” says Moravy. “We put the front seats and the interior module on top of the battery pack, and we bring it up through a big open hole [in the bottom of the body]. This allows us to do things in parallel and reduce the final assembly line by about 10 percent.
“Unboxed assembly is also known as ‘delayed 3D,’” adds Mwangi. “In other words, you stay in 2D as much as possible and go to 3D as late as possible in the vehicle production process. That means you have open access to the majority of your work areas, which gives you an opportunity to simplify operations. It also lends itself to simpler automation, because robots don’t need to work around a shell.”
BMW Paint Shop with Artificial Intelligence: Automated Rework
Tesla’s Magnet Mystery
A minor detail in Elon Musk’s “Master Plan Part 3” made big news in an obscure corner of physics. Colin Campbell, an executive in Tesla’s powertrain division, announced that his team was expunging rare-earth magnets from its motors, citing supply chain concerns and the toxicity of producing them.
Still, it’s unlikely that Tesla is simply replacing its magnets with something far worse, like ferrite, without making other changes. “You’ll have a huge magnet to carry around in a car,” says Alena Vishina, a physicist at Uppsala University. Luckily, a motor is a fairly complex machine with plenty of other components that, in theory, can be rearranged to soften the penalty of using weaker magnets. In computer models, materials company Proterial recently determined that by carefully positioning ferrite magnets and tweaking other aspects of motor design, many performance metrics of rare-earth-driven motors can be replicated. The result in that case was a motor that’s only about 30 percent heavier, a difference that could be small relative to a car’s overall bulk.
All in all, if you’re in a business where you can make an alternative work, it probably makes sense to do so, says Jim Chelikowsky, a physicist who studies magnetic materials at the University of Texas, Austin. But there are all kinds of reasons, he says, to look for better alternatives to rare earth magnets than ferrite. The challenge is finding materials with three essential qualities: They need to be magnetic, to hold that magnetism in the presence of other magnetic fields, and to tolerate high temperatures. Hot magnets cease to be magnets.
🔏🚗 In-Depth Analysis of Cyber Threats to Automotive Factories
We found that Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) operations, such as Conti and LockBit, are active in the automotive industry. These are characterized by stealing confidential data from within the target organization before encrypting their systems, forcing automakers to face threats of halted factory operations and public exposure of intellectual property (IP). For example, Continental (a major automotive parts manufacturer) was attacked in August, with some IT systems accessed. They immediately took response measures, restoring normal operations and cooperating with external cybersecurity experts to investigate the incident. However, in November, LockBit took to its data leak website and claimed to have 40TB of Continental’s data, offering to return the data for a ransom of $40 million.
Previous studies on automotive factories mainly focus on the general issues in the OT/ICS environment, such as difficulty in executing security updates, knowledge gaps among OT personnel regarding security, and weak vulnerability management. In light of this, TXOne Networks has conducted a detailed analysis of common automotive factory digital transformation applications to explain how attackers can gain initial access and link different threats together into a multi-pronged attack to cause significant damage to automotive factories.
In the study of industrial robots, controllers sometimes enable universal remote connection services (such as FTP or Web) or APIs defined by the manufacturer to provide operators with convenient robot operation through the Control Station. However, we found that most robot controllers do not enable any authentication mechanism by default and cannot even use it. This allows attackers lurking in the factory to directly execute any operation on robots through tools released by robot manufacturers. In the case of Digital Twin applications, attackers lurking in the factory can also use vulnerabilities in simulation devices to execute malicious code attacks on their models. When a Digital Twin’s model is attacked, it means that the generated simulation environment cannot maintain congruency with the physical environment. This entails that, after the model is tampered with, there may not necessarily be obvious malicious behavior which is a serious problem because of how long this can go unchecked and unfixed. This makes it easy for engineers to continue using the damaged Digital Twin in unknown circumstances, leading to inaccurate research and development or incorrect decisions made by the factory based on false information, which can result in greater financial losses than ransomware attacks.
Automotive works on its mojo
Top of the list here is reducing transportation costs. In fact, transportation is the largest single cost in the supply chain for automotive, says Matt Bush, vice president of engineering and innovation at KPI Solutions. The challenge, he says, is to increase the density of parts and components inside the trailer. But as Freeberg points out, LIB components can easily weigh out a truck faster than it can be cubed out. The other challenge is to maximize the return ratio of collapsed containers on their trip back to the manufacturing plant, wherever that might be, says Freeberg. The standard ratio today is 3:1, reducing the number of trucks needed to return sustainable containers by two for every three shipments.
As Bush of KPI explains, it’s a continuing battle for automakers to manage the flow and relative state of assembly completion of parts and components lineside, where space is at a premium. For instance, a key question continues to be: Is it better to send kits of parts to the line or stage all inventory there for on-the-spot assembly? “The kitting process takes space but reduces the number of steps people must take along the line,” adds Bush.
🚙 Mexico’s $100-billion auto parts industry is reinventing itself for the EV era
Tecnoformas, for instance, may eventually have to phase out its current production line. “Those will eventually disappear,” said Trinidad. The company has been on the lookout for the new materials, technologies, and processes that EVs will require. It already supplies Tesla the piping that holds the array of cables connecting to the dashboard. Trinidad is hopeful he’ll see a boost in sales once the Tesla gigafactory is up and running in northern Mexico. That won’t, however, fill the gap left by the lost sales of engine components for Tecnoformas. Trinidad said the effects of electrification will remain an unknown challenge. “We are aware that electric motors are not our expertise,” he said.
Aida Mercado Salazar, sales and business developer at IEMSA, a Mexican stamping and plastic-mold injection company, told Rest of World car makers are seeking more aluminum and resins, following the trend of using materials that are lighter, cheaper, and more efficient. “We’ve seen a tendency in the auto part industry of changing the engineering of certain heavy materials for plastic,” Villarreal said, noting that the trend is particularly evident in the EV sector, where the cars can be hundreds of pounds heavier than internal combustion vehicles. The batteries powering an EV can weigh an average of about 1,000 pounds, while the average eight-cylinder engine weighs between 400 and 700 pounds. “The technology [behind electrification] is all so new that first-generation suppliers like us are acting as guinea pigs,” she said.
🚙 Digital Twins: The Benefits and Challenges of Revolutionary Technology in Automotive Industries
With the advent of Industry 4.0, an increasing number of organizations have implemented digital twin technology to optimize their performance, enhance their educational initiatives, or facilitate advanced maintenance. Even the automotive industry has readily embraced this transformational technology. However, organizations must acknowledge that the adoption of digital twin technology may simultaneously expose them to potential cyber threats. Thus, securing digital twins within an organization should be viewed as an essential priority, on par with their implementation.
One of the challenges of implementing digital twin technology is maintaining consistency between the physical and virtual twins. In the case of a model corruption attack, it can be difficult to detect the issue, as developers may not notice the problem until they inspect the repository or run jobs on an infected digital twin. Running an infected digital twin not only leads to inconsistencies, but it can also compromise the CPS, as the malicious code sent by the infected twin may cause additional harm.
BMW Group Celebrates Opening the World's First Virtual Factory in NVIDIA Omniverse
DENSO reduce component simulation time by 80 percent using its Simcenter 3D and NX integrated process
A major challenge today is to improve productivity in the design and simulation of automotive parts. Even before the rise of software solutions, designers focused on geometry and turned to analysts to test and validate performance. However, simulation teams have always been much smaller than design teams – creating a bottleneck in the development process.
With Siemens tools, DENSO saw an opportunity to streamline the traditional workflow between design and engineering analysis, uniting the disciplines. This was particularly true for component design and analysis where simulation processes are more routine. DENSO’s goal was to reduce or eliminate the iteration with a new workflow.
🖨️🚙 How to Build a 3D Printing Setup in Automotive Industry
Depending on the performed task, whether it is developing an entirely new vehicle, making custom parts on demand, or renewing classic cars, 3D printing is a reliable solution in several ways. First, it facilitates the prototyping stages where each iteration can be flexibly redesigned when required and 3D printed for pre-production evaluation. This can relate to a variety of car components in the chassis, interior, or engine. Also, 3D printing is a cost-effective method employed when restoring or personalizing vehicles to specific needs. In car-tuning projects, 3D prints can substitute damaged and worn parts, as well as components which are too expensive or no longer available on the market. Therefore, 3D printed parts can be found in cars’ interior, dashboard, bodywork, and even under the hood.
AI Keeps Assembly Conveyor Rolling
The overhead conveyor is the backbone of the plant. It handles almost 1,250 cars per day during a three-shift operation. There is no back-up equipment, so failure is not an option. The conveyor’s parts are exposed to relatively high forces, causing them to wear in a relatively short time. Given that the conveyor is several meters above the floor, it is difficult to access for inspection.
ŠKODA engineers developed the Magic Eye to continuously monitor the condition of the conveyor’s moving parts without the need for maintenance personnel to climb ladders and physically do the job.
Six cameras are mounted on the conveyor frame at strategic locations to monitor the condition of various conveyor elements. Rapid assessment of each trolley’s condition is carried out as the conveyor is running. Images collected by the camera are transmitted via WiFi to a central database, where they are analyzed by artificial intelligence algorithms. The software detects wear by comparing each new image of the trolley with previously collected images. If an anomaly is detected, the software sends an alert to maintenance personnel, who can fix the trolley before it can create unexpected downtime.
How EVs Are Reshaping Labor Markets
The impact of EVs on auto manufacturing and supplier jobs is hard to assess. Electric vehicles require new or retooled factories, each requiring thousands of employees. How many will be new hires versus existing workers who are retrained is not clear. BMW, for example, claims it will not cut jobs in the transition to EVs, but it is likely that it will still reduce its workforce by both reskilling and attrition as other German automakers are contemplating. Further, given that EVs are said to need 30 percent less labor to produce than ICE vehicles, coupled with more automation that will be used for their manufacturing, many assembly line jobs may disappear.
High-end engineering and computer software and systems jobs at auto suppliers are also at risk, as auto manufacturers are moving to shift those jobs in-house. Former Volkswagen CEO Herbert Diess said, for example, that he expected by 2030 that software “will account for half of our development costs.” VW, like every other automaker, wants to control those costs.
The state of Michigan has been the epicenter of the U.S. auto industry for the past century with 11 assembly plants, 2,200 auto-research or design facilities, and 26 automaker and supplier headquarters. However, Michigan is finding the auto industry center of gravity moving away, as EV battery factories pop up across the Midwest “battery belt.” Automakers like to colocate EV factories near their battery factories, meaning the auto industry will not be the job creator in Michigan it once was.
How Toyota Factory Works with Zortrax 3D Printers
Toyota factories in Poland use a Zortrax M300 Plus 3D printer to make manufacturing jigs on demand. According to Toyota, investment in the 3D printing technology in automotive can pay for itself within one year. The key advantage of the Zortrax 3D printing technology, according to Toyota engineers are its agility.
“We have been using 3D printers for years now. They were already here when I came to work at Toyota four years ago.”, says Kondek. According to him, jigs that are 3D printed in automotive industry today used to be made by a separate tooling division equipped with CNC machines and other subtractive manufacturing tools. Fabrication of more demanding designs were simply outsourced to external subcontractors.
“Obviously, using such tools severely limited what we could do design-wise. Every time we thought about a new jig, we had to think twice about whether it could be fabricated or not. 3D printing in automotive sector solve this problem.”, explains Kondek. He adds that currently over 95% of the 3D printed jigs made at Toyota factory are manufactured in the LPD technology. The rest is 3D printed in other 3D printing technologies.
Digitise and dematerialise: Divergent CEO Kevin Czinger on supplying automotive structures to the world's biggest brands
The manufacture of lithium-ion phosphate battery cells at Coda’s facility in China relies heavily on coal-fired power. And because of that, ‘well over’ 200 kilogrammes (kg) of Co2 per kilowatt hour (kWh) is being produced in battery manufacture. At this time, kg of Co2 per kWh is the most important metric on Czinger’s mind and the cogs whirring in his head only intensify as he does the workings out to reveal that these batteries and EVs aren’t having enough impact.
Post Coda, Czinger educated himself on lifecycle assessments, figuring only a holistic approach would return the energy emission reduction that is required in an era of climate emergency. He also came to realise that the way automotive structures are manufactured, and the costs required to do so, need optimising – particularly as EVs, hybrid cars and internal combustion engine vehicles (and all the tooling and fixturing to come with them) continue to emerge. “The amortisation period, the competition, the driving down of values, you’re looking and saying, ‘this is environmentally and economically broken,’” Czinger says.
Czinger and his team developed the Divergent Adaptive Production System (DAPS) to ‘digitise and dematerialise’ automotive production and provide the technical competency for the company, in time, to become a Tier One supplier to the automotive industry. What Divergent is willing to talk about, however, is how its DAPS workflow works. Its engineers start by understanding the static stiffness targets of a structure, then the typical load cases it will be exposed to, then what its boundary conditions are, then its crash requirements, durability requirements and dynamic stiffness response requirements. This information is the input for the Divergent design algorithm, which is where the company enters the concept phase. Here, Divergent gives the OEM ‘optionality’ to, for example, reduce stiffness in a certain area of the structure to reduce mass. After the concept phase comes the detailed design phase, and after that, it’s time to print the part.
Who Makes America's Semi-Trucks
Inside Rivian and Ford’s Plants, as They Race to Build EVs Faster
How Automotive Manufacturing Changed the World
Conveyor-Less Micro Factories for Urban Car Production
The automobile manufacturing value chain consists of a press shop, body shop, paint shop and assembly. The assembly process is different from other processes in terms of automation. The level of automation in press shops, body shops and paint shops is usually very high. Many are nearly 100 percent automated. However, final assembly is difficult to automate due to the complexity of the tasks and diversity of the parts.
One way to achieve mass individualization while maintaining various automation levels is to decouple final assembly from the value chain. The press shop, body shop and paint shop would continue as mass production centers in central locations, while final assembly would be carried out in separate micro factories located in urban areas. The assembly process does not need to be physically located with the other manufacturing processes. Instead, it can be moved to an urban area where the labor supply is elastic. Low-volume, high-mix production can be realized with this model.
An urban automotive assembly plant should be designed for maximum flexibility, minimal capital investment and asynchronous production. That points away conveyors and favors autonomous transport technologies. Two options are available: autonomous mobile robots (AMR) and VaaC. AMRs are vehicles that are equipped with on-board sensors to autonomously move vehicles or materials along predefined paths without the need for magnetic tapes on the floor. In VaaC, the EV guides itself through the assembly process. A sensor skid, temporarily attached under the EV, guides the EV based on local sensing and communication with a high-level fleet management system. The skid is designed to be easily removed at the end of the assembly. The skid body has a set of pins that temporarily engage with locating holes in the underbody. The skid is equipped with numerous sensors that detect objects around the EV.
Inside Ather's new manufacturing facility focused on efficiency
The production plant is expected to provide a huge fillip for Ather in terms of meeting the demand and reducing wait times. But more than that, it serves as a model for Ather Energy’s future plants as it incorporates automation and IoT capabilities. Addressing a room full of reporters, Ather’s CTO and Co-founder Swapnil Jain said the new facility is 100% IoT-based, whereas Gen 2, Ather’s first big plant—also in Hosur—only uses IoT in its battery line.
Comau Leverages Advanced Automation to Deliver Faster Time-to-Market and Enhanced Flexibility for the New Alfa Romeo Tonale
As part of Comau’s lean manufacturing approach, the automated and semi-automated production solution is based on the proprietary ComauFlex technology, nicknamed Butterfly due to its impressive agility and use of suspended robots. This set-up allows Alfa Romeo to change or modify a specific vehicle model by adjusting the robot tooling, not the arrangement of the robots themselves. In addition to protecting the scalability of the customer’s initial investment, the solution is designed to enable the introduction of new models in the future for a fraction of the initial expenditure. Indeed, the entire system features 468 welding robots, 148 of which are completely new and 320 taken from existing lines. Comau utilized advanced simulation tools during the entire development period, guaranteeing the best quality product and throughput.
LG, Altair build AI-powered validation platform for automotive parts
LG Electronics Inc., an industry frontrunner in applying artificial intelligence to home appliances, said on Wednesday it has joined forces with Altair Engineering Inc., a US tech firm, in developing an AI-powered validation platform for automotive parts.
Integrating AI technology into the vehicle component development process will provide LG’s clients with more reliable and high-quality solutions for products, including infotainment systems, LG said. The South Korean electronics company said the new platform leverages a machine learning algorithm to accurately predict and measure product performance from an early stage of the design validation process.
Market Dynamics, Technologies Drive Automotive Design
The ground underneath is constantly shifting: Supply chain constraints, software defined architectures, functional safety requirements, and the changing dynamics among original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), tier 1 suppliers, and semiconductor companies are altering the landscape of automotive electronics. This dynamic environment was the subject of discussion in a recent panel hosted by ProteanTecs, and, judging from that talk, “changing” may be an understatement.
“For each and every little functionality, there’s a single ECU,” that’s about to change drastically as OEMs move to a domain-based architecture with high-performance computers. Sustainability is also going to be viewed through a new lens because of data, as the car now has so many sources that will inform optimal charging times and where charging stations are placed.
Yorii Automobile Plant, Saitama Factory, Honda Motor Co., Ltd.
How Long Does It Take to Build a Car These Days?
An average car has about 30,000 parts. Once those parts are manufactured and brought to the final production line, it takes automakers about 18 to 35 hours to produce one mass-market vehicle – from welding to full engine assembly to painting.
While electric vehicles have fewer parts than traditional cars, Ecker said the impact on the build time has been minor. “The overall assembly from the time that they start producing rolling chassis frame to the time they get a vehicle out the door, hasn’t really changed much over the years,” said Ecker. “The wild card is the development time in certain areas of the vehicle, like the battery pack in an EV that has thousands of parts in itself.”
According to DirectIndustry e-Magazine, cars in the past would take four to five years to go from the design stage (just the development of the vehicle’s look and basic aerodynamics) to production, but that time is being cut in half thanks to the rapid integration of digital technology throughout the entire process of building a car – from research and development to production.
AI Driven Vision Inspection Automation for Forged Connecting Rods
2022 Assembly Plant of the Year: Continuous Improvement Culture Thrives at Brose
The complex world inside a car door or under a seat is Brose’s domain. The $7 billion Tier One supplier does business with just about every automaker in the world. Customers include legacy firms ranging from Audi to Volkswagen, in addition to startup electric vehicle manufacturers such as Lucid and Rivian. One of Brose Group’s most important facilities is its 18-year-old assembly plant in Vance, AL, which generates more than $400 million in annual revenue. The 302,000-square-foot factory is strategically located between Birmingham and Tuscaloosa, near Daimler’s sprawling Mercedes-Benz assembly plant that produces sport utility vehicles.
“During the last three years, we have conducted numerous process improvements and implemented procedures to reduce our plant costs and improve our overall quality,” says Jim Barbaretta, plant manager. “We have improved productivity and production costs by 25 percent over the last four years. “We also improved our productivity by 14 percent and have achieved an average continuous improvement savings of more than $2 million annually,” adds Barbaretta.
How Volkswagen and Google Cloud are using machine learning to design more energy-efficient cars
Volkswagen strives to design beautiful, performant, and energy efficient vehicles. This entails an iterative process where designers go through many design drafts, evaluating each, integrating the feedback, and refining. For example, a vehicle’s drag coefficient—its resistance to air—is one of the most important factors of energy efficiency. Thus, getting estimates of the drag coefficient for several designs helps the designers experiment and converge toward more energy-efficient solutions. The cheaper and faster this feedback loop is, the more it enables the designers.
This joint research effort between Volkswagen and Google has produced promising results with the help of the Vertex AI platform. In this first milestone, the team was able to successfully bring recent AI research results a step closer to practical application for car design. This first iteration of the algorithm can produce a drag coefficient estimate with an average error of just 4%, within a second. An average error of 4%, while not quite as accurate as a physical wind tunnel test, can be used to narrow a large selection of design candidates to a small shortlist. And given how quickly the estimates appear, we have made a substantial improvement on the existing methods that take days or weeks. With the algorithm that we have developed, designers can run more efficiency tests, submit more candidates, and iterate towards richer, more effective designs in just a small fraction of the time previously required.
How to Speed Up EV Cable Assembly
High-voltage connectors used in EV harness applications have many components that require precise assembly. Automation can improve productivity, quality and throughput when stripping and crimping cables. High-voltage connectors require several production steps that must be performed in a specific sequence. While most engineers want to automate every process, the cost of a fully automatic system cannot always be justified. Some process steps are more challenging and require more precision. For instance, removing the foil layer or cutting the shield is critical, because connector performance or safety may be affected significantly. In addition, some process steps are required for almost all connectors and cable types, while other steps are required only for certain connectors.
To achieve precision and throughput, manufacturers must invest in automation. It can provide not only high precision, but complete flexibility so that processing requirements can change in the future. It is important that systems can be expanded so they can grow and adapt as demand changes. Different connectors often have very different individual process steps because of their unique functions and constructions. However, there are some basic steps that apply to almost all of them. These steps pertain to properly stripping the cable and loading the ferrules.
Stories From The Field: Automotive Plant Tour
Throughout my years I have been in many manufacturing facilities. Oddly enough, I have seen nearly every part of a passenger car manufactured and then fully assembled. The amount of compressed air applications in automotive supplier and manufacturing facilities are tremendous. Here are some stories from just a few we have encountered over the years, and all of them can be found in our Application Database.
BMWs to Drive Themselves During Production
BMW Group project manager Sascha Andree explained: “Automated driving within the plant is fundamentally different from autonomous driving for customers. It doesn’t use sensors in the vehicle. In fact, the car itself is more or less blind and the sensors for maneuvering them are integrated along the route through the plant.”
Initially, the vehicles will only move through the assembly area and then to a parking area, ready for their onward journey by train or truck. But in reality, it is possible to use the tech as soon as the cars are capable of driving independently in the production process.
Smart Manufacturing at Audi
Some 5,300 spot welds are required to join the parts that make up the body of an Audi A6. Until recently, production staff used ultrasound to manually monitor the quality of spot welds based on random sampling. Now, however, engineers are testing a smarter way of determining weld quality. They are using AI software to detect quality anomalies automatically in real time. The robots collect data on current flow and voltage on every weld. An AI algorithm continuously checks that those values fall within predetermined standards. Engineers monitor the weld data on a dashboard. If a fault is detected, they can then perform manual checks.
Industry 4.0 at Škoda
Over the past few years, Škoda has invested millions of dollars in state-of-the-art assembly technologies to increase productivity, improve worker safety, and decrease the company’s environmental footprint. As part of an overall Industry 4.0 strategy, the company has implemented additive manufacturing, artificial intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous mobile robots and other technology.
Adding a new workstation to an assembly line requires careful planning—especially if regular operations are expected to continue at the same time. When engineers at Škoda’s assembly plant in Vrchlabí, Czech Republic, wanted to integrate a new robot into a gearbox production line, the project was fully operational in just three weeks—thanks to digital twin technology. Within a cycle time of less than 30 seconds, the new workstation installs bearings into each gearbox. Robots install the bearings to meet the precision requirements of the application.
Optikon uses mathematical combinatorial analysis methods to find various solutions to what is known as the “knapsack problem.” It addresses the question of how certain objects can be optimally fitted into a limited space. While the classic knapsack problem only takes into account the weight and value of the items to be packed, Optikon also considers floor space, the volume of the item, and when the goods have to be shipped.
The Race To Zero Defects In Auto ICs
While semiconductor test engineers are making great strides on isolating fab-generated defects, assembly engineers are quietly focusing attention on improving inspection and processing of equipment data to catch latent defects. This is a big deal for automotive electronics. According to a BMW presentation at the 2017 Automotive Electronics Council reliability workshop, most semiconductor devices fail within the car’s warranty period.
The carmaker noted that 22% of warranty costs are due to electronics and electrical control units. Of those failed parts, BMW said 77% of the failures are semiconductor devices, and 23% of the parts are isolated to active and passive components. Of those semiconductor failures, 48% were due to systematic fails, 24% to test coverage, 15% to random failures, and 6% were retested and did not fail the second time. The failure pareto was also broken down to 41% final test, 24% front-end processing, 22% design, and 12% assembly.
For assembly facilities to deliver 10 dppb quality to their automotive customers, they need to learn from customer returns. This requires investment in assembly equipment data collection and traceability. Latent defects that become activated during the warranty period yet pass electrical test necessitates 100% inspection to screen for these failures. Yet all this investment in more inspection and data collection places a financial strain on traditionally inexpensive assembly operations. There is constructive tension between assembly facilities and their automotive customers, as they are both cost-sensitive. Still, somehow this pathway to 10 dppb will be funded.
Engine block assembly line for Scania's trucks of tomorrow
BMW Creates Fully Automated Production Lines for 3D Printed Car Parts
By utilizing systems made up of laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) platforms, combined with AI and robotics, that it has developed, the IDAM consortium can print 50,000 series parts a year, as well as 10,000 new and individual parts. Opened in 2020, BMW’s campus at Oberschleißheim has 50 3D printers for both metal and plastics. Aside from investing in a variety of 3D printing startups, including Desktop Metal and Xometry, the company also employs HP MultiJet Fusion (MJF) and EOS machines, among other brands.
Towards a more circular production in Scania Oskarshamn
Great achievements towards a more circular production are made at Scania’s cab factory In Oskarshamn, Sweden, since 2019. The production is fossil free since 2020, more material is recycled, and the energy consumption has decreased with several thousand MWh.
Virtual Factory Tour―Automobile Production Plant
Audi Production Factory Tour 2022
Ford rolls out autonomous robot-operated 3D printers in vehicle production
Leveraging an in-house-developed interface, Ford has managed to get the KUKA-built bot to ‘speak the same language’ as its other systems, and operate them without human interaction. So far, the firm’s patent-pending approach has been deployed to 3D print custom parts for the Mustang Shelby GT500 sports car, but it could yet yield efficiency savings across its production workflow.
“This new process has the ability to change the way we use robotics in our manufacturing facilities,” said Jason Ryska, Ford’s Director of Global Manufacturing Technology Development. “Not only does it enable Ford to scale its 3D printer operations, it extends into other aspects of our manufacturing processes – this technology will allow us to simplify equipment and be even more flexible on the assembly line.”
At present, the company is utilizing its setup to make low-volume, custom parts such as a brake line bracket for the Performance Package-equipped version of its Mustang Shelby GT500. Moving forwards though, Ford believes its program could be applied to make other robots in its production line more efficient as well, and it has filed several patents, not just on its interface, but the positioning of its KUKA bot.
UVeye - Vehicle Inspection for the 21st Century
Hyundai Motor’s Alabama plant: World’s second most productive
At Hyundai’s Alabama plant, it took 24.02 hours to fully assemble a vehicle, more productive than 28.71 hours at General Motors’ Fairfax plant, 29.99 hours at GM’s Lansing Delta assembly plant, and 31.92 hours at Toyota Motor’s Georgetown plant, according to the consulting firm.
Hyundai’s US plant is also more productive than its main Korean manufacturing plant in Ulsan in terms of units produced per hour. Hyundai Motor Manufacturing Alabama LLC (HMMA) produces 68 cars an hour, compared with 45 cars at Hyundai’s Ulsan plant, according to the auto industry.
Why Tesla Soared as Other Automakers Struggled to Make Cars
GM and Ford closed one factory after another — sometimes for months on end — because of a shortage of computer chips, leaving dealer lots bare and sending car prices zooming. Yet Tesla racked up record sales quarter after quarter and ended the year having sold nearly twice as many vehicles as it did in 2020 unhindered by an industrywide crisis.
“Tesla, born in Silicon Valley, never outsourced their software — they write their own code,” said Morris Cohen, a professor emeritus at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania who specializes in manufacturing and logistics. “They rewrote the software so they could replace chips in short supply with chips not in short supply. The other carmakers were not able to do that.”
How Elon Musk’s Software Focus Helped Tesla Navigate Chip Shortage
Tesla has been able to keep production lines running in part by leaning on in-house software engineering expertise that has made it more adept than many rival auto makers at adjusting to a global shortfall of semiconductors, industry executives and consultants said. Chips are used in everything from controlling an electric motor to charging a phone.
Gigafactories Help Battery Manufacturers Meet Growing EV Demand
Independent cart conveyance systems rely on linear motor technology. Linear synchronous motors (LSM) use electromagnetic force to index carriers more quickly and efficiently than traditional conveyance systems. Linear motors use components that don’t wear or come into contact with one another, which drastically reduces maintenance needs and decreases downtime.
The system’s capabilities range from individual cell sorting to full battery module and pack assembly, while also performing required testing. The machine incorporates linear servo motors that position loads in precisely the correct direction at high speeds. And changeovers simply involve selecting the correct mode from the operator interface.
Free from the constraints of a traditional conveyor, this system can improve your operations by helping you create faster, more flexible battery lines using independent, programmable movers. Time to market is improved by new LSM technology thanks to built-in full-line simulation capabilities that include an integrated track-and-trace system that eliminates the need for external sensing.
The Role Of Blockchain In The Development Of The EV Industry
Blockchain-based applications come with a track-and-trace feature. This feature allows EV manufacturers to keep tabs on the materials as they are brought for production. Certain types of materials, such as wolframite and cobalt, are sourced from hard-to-trace developed countries. Such materials change hands several times before they’re brought to factories for processing and production. Therefore, blockchain is useful to accurately store the provenance-related details of raw materials so that the manipulation of such materials coming from such sources can be prevented. Using blockchain for EV production also enables manufacturers to monitor any diversions while materials are being brought into factories for EV production. Blockchain-enabled tracking allows EV manufacturers to react to vehicle recalls in a cost-effective way. If there are any material issues that require vehicles to be recalled, the manufacturers can call back only those EVs that were built using parts or materials from the partner who supplied them. This makes your supply chain much leaner and cost-effective. A leaner supply chain results in lower production costs for EV makers.
Stellantis Goes All-In With its Software Strategy
A transformative strategy is needed to manage software requirements for 14 distinct brands, perhaps the largest number of diverse brands of any auto OEM—across price range and vehicle segments ranging from consumer to commercial vehicles. This software complexity provides major cost savings and revenue opportunities after the software platform transformation is completed. The risk is significant development cost over the next four to five years.
Stellantis estimates that 80 percent of software platforms can be shared among brands, with 20 percent requiring brand-specific software—mostly related to user interfaces. Stellantis is clearly aiming to own a significant portion of its software value chain for all of its brands. Nearly all auto OEMs are on this path, adding software expertise to their core competencies.
A key software goal is decoupling software from hardware platforms. Hardware-software decoupling has become standard procedure due to its many advantages. The latest advantage is the potential to swap out chips when supply chains are disrupted.
The Big Automotive Semiconductor Problem
BMW uses Nvidia’s Omniverse to build state-of-the-art factories
BMW has standardized on a new technology unveiled by Nvidia, the Omniverse, to simulate every aspect of its manufacturing operations, in an effort to push the envelope on smart manufacturing. BMW has done this down to work order instructions for factory workers from 31 factories in its production network, reducing production planning time by 30%, the company said.
Product customizations dominate BMW’s product sales and production. They’re currently producing 2.5 million vehicles per year, and 99% of them are custom. BMW says that each production line can be quickly configured to produce any one of ten different cars, each with up to 100 options or more across ten models, giving customers up to 2,100 ways to configure a BMW. In addition, Nvidia Omniverse gives BMW the flexibility to reconfigure its factories quickly to accommodate new big model launches.
BMW succeeds with its product customization strategy because each system essential to production is synchronized on the Nvidia Omniverse platform. As a result, every step in customizing a given model reflects customer requirements and also be shared in real-time with each production team. In addition, BMW says real-time production monitoring data is used for benchmarking digital twin performance. With the digital twins of an entire factory, BMW engineers can quickly identify where and how each specific models’ production sequence can be improved. An example is how BMW uses digital humans and simulation to test new workflows for worker ergonomics and efficiency, training digital humans with data from real associates. They’re also doing the same with the robotics they have in place across plant floors today. Combining real-time production and process monitoring data with simulated results helps BMW’s engineers quickly identify areas for improvement, so quality, cost, and production efficiency goals keep getting achieved.
Optimized quality control data keep the automotive supply chain flowing
“What the FARO ScanArm allowed me to do was protect my company by proving to the customer that the issue started with their engineering print. With this particular issue, I provided a full layout to the customer with all of the profile call outs from the engineering drawing that showed where the issues were.”
Without FARO solutions and the more accurate data they provided, Taylor Metal Products might have been held financially responsible for these “no build conditions.” Thanks to the fact that the ScanArm was being used, however, Jason was able to “quickly address and correct these severe issues.”
“CAD is your perfect master; it can’t be refuted,” Jason explained. “The great thing about the FARO scans is that I can use color maps. One of the overseas manufacturers is really big about pulling those color maps because with the nature of our product, you’re taking a piece of metal and you’re bending it in different directions. The natural tendency of steel is to conform back to its original state. So, the stamping world is not like the machining world where you’re dealing with really tight tolerances, cutting and threading a hole, or boring out a hole. In the stamping world, you’re pushing metal. So that’s where the scans really come into play. The color maps show any deviation from CAD throughout the entire part. You can scan a profile with a fixed CMM, but it is a linear format, not 3D — and the CMM has to be programed to do this. With the FARO ScanArm after the CAD is locked in, it’s just one click to produce the color map. And the Japanese automotive manufacturers are big on using this technology.”
2021 Assembly Plant of the Year: GKN Drives Transformation With New Culture, Processes and Tools
All-wheel drive (AWD) technology has taken the automotive world by storm in recent years, because of its ability to effectively transfer power to the ground. Today, many sport utility vehicles use AWD for better acceleration, performance, safety and traction in all kinds of driving conditions. GKN’s state-of-the-art ePowertrain assembly plant in Newton, NC, supplies AWD systems to BMW, Ford, General Motors and Stellantis facilities in North America and internationally. The 505,000-square-foot facility operates multiple assembly lines that mass-produce more than 1.5 million units annually.
“Areas of improvement include a first-time-through tracking dashboard tailored to each individual line and shift that tracks each individual failure mode,” says Tim Nash, director of manufacturing engineering. “We use this tool to monitor improvements and progress on a daily basis.
“Overhaul of process control limits has been one of our biggest achievements,” claims Nash. “By setting tighter limits for assembly operations such as pressing and screwdriving, we are able to detect and reject defective units in station vs. a downstream test operation. This saves both time and scrap related to further assembly of the defective unit.”
“When we started on our turnaround journey, our not-right-first-time rate was about 26 percent,” adds Smith. “Today, it averages around 6 percent. A few years ago, cost of non-quality was roughly $23 million annually vs. less than $3 million today.”
Europe’s new €1.6bn chip plant needs only 10 workers on factory floor
A 60,000 square meter facility built specializing in power semiconductors seeks ease bottlenecks for major automotive clients. The increase in automation solutions has made localized European production of semiconductors possible. By reducing comparable personnel needed to run the facility from 150 to 10 makes the factory cost competitive with factories in Asia.
Can a Green-Economy Boom Town Be Built to Last?
The epicenter of that boom is an electric-vehicle maker named Rivian, which brought in Mr. Mosier’s company and others in the Normal, Ill., area to work on the city’s costliest construction project in decades: a massive auto plant.
As it prepares to deliver its first electric pickup trucks and sport utility vehicles this year, Rivian has spent around $1.5 billion renovating and expanding a factory once owned by Mitsubishi. On a typical day the 3.3-million-square-foot plant hosts several hundred construction workers alongside more than 2,500 workers employed by the company, which expects to eventually double its local head count.
This Tesla co-founder has a plan to recycle your EV batteries
Circular Car Factories
The next big shift will be an environmentally friendly movement dubbed the “circular auto factory.” According to some experts, the circular cars initiative will reshape the auto industry during the next two decades, as OEMs and suppliers attempt to achieve net-zero carbon emissions across the entire vehicle life cycle.
The term “circular car” refers to a theoretical vehicle that has efficiently maximized its use of aluminum, carbon-fiber composites, glass, fabric, rubber, steel, thermoplastics and other materials. Ideally, it would produce zero material waste and zero pollution during manufacture, utilization and disposal.
One of the key elements of a circular car factory is a closed-loop recycling program where disassembly lines are housed in the same facility as traditional final assembly lines. All vehicle components and materials are remanufactured, reused and recycled at the end of life.
Applying Artificial Intelligence to Paint Shop Robots
Häcker says that factories in the automotive industry have “enormous amounts of latent data about manufacturing processes, raw materials, and products. The key to leveraging these data assets is connectivity with the right interface at the control level to get at the information provided by robots, ovens, cathodic electrocoating systems or conveyor technology. Operators in existing plants are often constrained because most of their systems do not have connectivity and the right interface for data acquisition.”
Industry 4.0 and the Automotive Industry
“It takes about 30 hours to manufacture a vehicle. During that time, each car generates massive amounts of data,” points out Robert Engelhorn, director of the Munich plant. “With the help of artificial intelligence and smart data analytics, we can use this data to manage and analyze our production intelligently. AI is helping us to streamline our manufacturing even further and ensure premium quality for every customer. It also saves our employees from having to do monotonous, repetitive tasks.”
One part of the plant that is already seeing benefits from AI is the press shop, which turns more than 30,000 sheet metal blanks a day into body parts for vehicles. Each blank is given a laser code at the start of production so the body part can be clearly identified throughout the manufacturing process. This code is picked up by BMW’s iQ Press system, which records material and process parameters, such as the thickness of the metal and oil layer, and the temperature and speed of the presses. These parameters are related to the quality of the parts produced.
How Toyota kept making cars when the chips were down
But not all carmakers have suffered equally. While rival OEMs (or original equipment manufacturers, as automakers are known) stumbled, Toyota kept production largely on target until May. The company has said factory closures owing to chip shortages would cause a shortfall of 20,000 vehicles in Japan—less than 1% of Japanese production in fiscal 2021. Toyota’s North American production, meanwhile, hummed along at 90% of capacity for the year through June. That prolonged productivity propelled the company to a rare victory: In the second quarter, it was the No. 1 automaker by sales in North America, marking the first time since 1998 that GM hasn’t held the top spot.
Toyota’s handy navigation throughout the shortage is more than just good luck: It’s good management. Over the past decade, Toyota has overhauled the way it oversees its supply chain—implementing hard lessons it learned a decade ago after the Fukushima earthquake and tsunami devastated swaths of Japan’s industrial heartland. Those gradual reforms prepared the company to ride out the current chip crisis, executives say. And just as the success of Toyota’s “just in time” (JIT) manufacturing model led automakers the world over to imitate the company in the 1980s, the company’s new advances may spawn another wave of imitation.
Unlike many of its rivals, Toyota essentially stockpiles chips. That’s a deviation from JIT, which dictates that supplies reach the production line only when they are needed. (Stockpiles occupy valuable space on the factory floor, as well as on the company’s books.) In practice, Toyota’s suppliers do the actual stockpiling. Like all automakers, the company relies on a multitude of components that contain semiconductors, such as smart displays or audio systems. Toyota requires suppliers of those components to maintain up to a six months’ buffer supply of chips dedicated to Toyota orders—just in case.
Accelerating the Design of Automotive Catalyst Products Using Machine Learning
The design of catalyst products to reduce harmful emissions is currently an intensive process of expert-driven discovery, taking several years to develop a product. Machine learning can accelerate this timescale, leveraging historic experimental data from related products to guide which new formulations and experiments will enable a project to most directly reach its targets. We used machine learning to accurately model 16 key performance targets for catalyst products, enabling detailed understanding of the factors governing catalyst performance and realistic suggestions of future experiments to rapidly develop more effective products. The proposed formulations are currently undergoing experimental validation.
Why Tesla Needed The Giga Press
BMW-led study highlights need for AI-based AM part identification
With time-to-market in the automotive industry steadily decreasing, demand for prototyping components is higher than before and the vision of large-scale production, delivering just-in-time to assembly lines, is emerging. This is not only a question of increasing output quantity and production speed but also of economic viability. The process chain of current available AM technologies still includes a high amount of labor intensive work and process steps, which lead to a high proportion of personnel costs and decreased product throughput. Also, these operations lead to bottlenecks and downtimes in the overall process chain.
Nissan Accelerates Assembly Line with 3D Printing Solution
Previously Nissan outsourced all of its prototypes and jigs to mechanical suppliers who used traditional manufacturing methods, such as CNC and drilling. Although the quality of the finished product was good, the lead times were long and inflexible and the costs were high. Even simple tools could cost in the region of 400€ for machining. By printing some of these parts in-house with 3D printers, Nissan has cut the time of designing, refining and producing parts from one week to just one day and slashed costs by 95%.
Eric Pallarés, chief technical officer at BCN3D, adds: “The automotive industry is probably the best example of scaling up a complex product with the demands of meeting highest quality standards. It’s fascinating to see how the assembly process of a car – where many individual parts are put together in an assembly line – relies on FFF printed parts at virtually every stage. Having assembled thousands of cars, Nissan has found that using BCN3D 3D printing technology to make jigs and fixtures for complex assembly operations delivers consistently high quality components at a reduced time and lower cost”.
Circular Economy 3D Printing: Opportunities to Improve Sustainability in AM
Within the 3D printing sector alone, there are various initiatives currently underway to develop closed-loop manufacturing processes that reuse and repurpose waste materials. Within the automotive sector, Groupe Renault is creating a facility entirely dedicated to sustainable automotive production through recycling and retrofitting vehicles using 3D printing, while Ford and HP have teamed up to recycle 3D printing waste into end-use automotive parts.
One notable project that is addressing circular economy 3D printing is BARBARA (Biopolymers with Advanced functionalities foR Building and Automotive parts processed through Additive Manufacturing), a Horizon 2020 project that brought together 11 partners from across Europe to produce bio-based materials from food waste suitable for 3D printing prototypes in the automotive and construction sectors.
John Deere and Audi Apply Intel’s AI Technology
Identifying defects in welds is a common quality control process in manufacturing. To make these inspections more accurate, John Deere is applying computer vision, coupled with Intel’s AI technology, to automatically spot common defects in the automated welding process used in its manufacturing facilities.
At Audi, automated welding applications range from spot welding to riveting. The widespread automation in Audi factories is part of the company’s goal of creating Industrie 4.0-level smart factories. A key aspect of this goal involves Audi’s recognition that creating customized hardware and software to handle individual use cases is not preferrable. Instead, the company focuses on developing scalable and flexible platforms that allow them to more broadly apply advanced digital capabilities such as data analytics, machine learning, and edge computing.
Ford's Ever-Smarter Robots Are Speeding Up the Assembly Line
At a Ford Transmission Plant in Livonia, Michigan, the station where robots help assemble torque converters now includes a system that uses AI to learn from previous attempts how to wiggle the pieces into place most efficiently. Inside a large safety cage, robot arms wheel around grasping circular pieces of metal, each about the diameter of a dinner plate, from a conveyor and slot them together.
The technology allows this part of the assembly line to run 15 percent faster, a significant improvement in automotive manufacturing where thin profit margins depend heavily on manufacturing efficiencies.
How Delphi Technologies Reduced Scrap and Improved Transparency with Smart Work Station
In Delphi’s Torreon Plant, they manufacture sensors with specific elements that detect specific changes or issues in how the engine is working. Due to untracked quality issues and incorrect parameters, they were producing a higher than acceptable volume of scrap, from which it was not possible to recover materials. While these quality issues did not impact customers, they led to increased materials costs. They believed they could reduce the volume of scrap by tracking and addressing key elements of the production process, but did not have a software tool that supported that level of granularity. They selected Smart Work Station to address the problem.
Smart Work Station offers Delphi the flexibility to document key elements of the process on the floor, including the recording of personalized data to correlate with performance and quality metrics. Using checklists and digital work instructions, they have been able to ensure consistent execution of processes and measure the results of those efforts.
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Missing Chips Snarl Car Production at Factories Worldwide
Semiconductor shortages may persist throughout the first half as chipmakers adjust their operations, researcher IHS Market predicted on Dec. 23. Automakers will start to see component supply gradually ease in the next two to three months, China Passenger Car Association, which groups the country’s largest carmakers, said Monday.
Chipmakers favor consumer-electronics customers because their orders are larger than those of automakers – the annual smartphone market alone is more than 1 billion devices, compared with fewer than 100 million cars. Automaking is also a lower-margin business, leaving manufacturers unwilling to bid up chip prices as they avoid risking their profitability.
How Ford, GM, FCA, and Tesla are bringing back factory workers
In the last week, factory employees have returned to work across the United States to make cars for the country’s four main auto manufacturers: Ford, General Motors, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, and Tesla. And each of those companies has published a plan showing how it will try to keep those workers from contracting or spreading COVID-19.
Those plans largely take the same shape. They’re presented in glossy PDF pamphlets, each starting with a letter to employees from the respective company’s highest-ranking executive overseeing workplace safety. Like any corporate document, they occasionally get bogged down with platitudes. But they all largely describe a lot of the same basic precautions, including supplying employees with Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) like masks or enforcing physical distancing of at least six feet.
How GM and Ford switched out pickup trucks for breathing machines
In the most severe cases of COVID-19, a patient’s lungs become so inflamed and full of fluid that they no longer deliver enough oxygen to the bloodstream to keep that person alive. One way to counteract this is by using a ventilator, which helps the patient’s lungs operate while the rest of the body fights off the virus.
As the spread of the new coronavirus bloomed into a pandemic, it became clear that there may not be enough ventilators in the United States (and around the world) to treat the coming wave of patients with these severe symptoms.
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Ford Focuses on Flexibility
Another Ford plant that’s located just 17 miles away from the remnants of the Highland Park facility represents the future of auto manufacturing. The 4-million-square-foot Michigan Assembly Plant (MAP) in Wayne, MI, is Ford’s showcase for flexible, green, lean manufacturing.
Engineers transformed an old plant that once made large sport utility vehicles (SUVs) into a state-of-the-art factory that assembles fuel-efficient small cars. Ford invested $550 million to make the 60-year-old complex the first assembly plant in the world capable of building a full line-up of vehicles on the same line. Thanks to an integrated production strategy, MAP assemblers build three different types of electrified vehicles alongside traditional gas-powered cars.
New tools and equipment, coupled with world-class quality standards and a revised lean production philosophy, allow Ford to make small cars profitably while adjusting production volume and production mix based on market demand. Reprogrammable tooling in the body shop, standardized equipment in the paint shop and a common-build sequence in final assembly make MAP Ford’s most flexible plant.