Experiments in automation: Automated electric vehicle manufacturing

An interesting article in the New York Times focuses on an experiment in automated electric vehicle manufacturing. The aim is to employ low volume factories that mostly or completely eliminate humans from the assembly line and replace those workers with six different stations composed of robots programmed to do several tasks instead of one or two. 

The small factory concept is intended to significantly reduce five major cost components in vehicle manufacturing, manufacturing plant construction, employee costs, metal shaping, painting and welding. The vehicles are intended to be made mostly of polypropylene and non-metallic composite materials that can be made in any shape or color, with parts held together by adhesives instead of welds. The assembly line would be replaced by robot stations, each doing several jobs and the vehicle carried from station to station by a robot carrier.

A robot station

The NYT writes:

A small electric vehicle company backed by UPS wants to replace the assembly lines automakers have used for more than a century with something radically different — small factories employing a few hundred workers.

The company, Arrival, is creating highly automated “microfactories” where its delivery vans and buses will be assembled by multitasking robots, breaking from the approach pioneered by Henry Ford and used by most of the world’s automakers. The plants would produce tens of thousands of vehicles a year. That’s far fewer than traditional auto plants, which require 2,000 or more workers and typically produce hundreds of thousands of vehicles a year.

The advantage, according to Arrival, is that its microfactories will cost about $50 million rather than the $1 billion or more required to build a traditional factory. The company, which is based in London and is setting up factories in England and the United States, says this method should yield vans that cost a lot less than other electric models and even today’s standard, diesel-powered vehicles.

“The assembly line approach is very capital-intensive, and you have to get to very high production levels to make any margin,” said Avinash Rugoobur, Arrival’s president and a former General Motors executive. “The microfactory allows us to build vehicles profitably at really any volume.”

The company hopes its electric vehicles will disrupt the normally sleepy market for delivery vans. Such vehicles are well suited to electrification because they travel a set number of miles a day and can be charged overnight. Arrival has already won over UPS, which has about a 4 percent stake in the company and plans to buy 10,000 Arrival vans over the next several years.

The use of composites, which can be produced in any color, would eliminate three of the most expensive parts of an auto plant — the paint shop, the giant presses that stamp out fenders and other parts, and the robots that weld metal parts into larger underbody components. Each typically costs several hundred million dollars.

“For high-volume applications, this doesn’t seem workable,” said Kristin Dziczek, senior vice president of research at the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Mich. “Automation is great for things that are repetitious and precise. But if they are talking about very low volume, it could be viable.”

“We’ve been very pleased as we get the equipment working in our simulations,” Mr. Abelson said. “Now it’s the commissioning process. It’s installing the equipment and getting it right.”

Humans install interior parts and some other components by hand

Whether this concept will work as planned is still untested. But it is a reminder that automation will continue to progress. Presumably more jobs will be lost than created, but the amount of loss is disputed. One line of argument posits that automation is more likely to change jobs than destroy them, so the impact may be hard to predict with reasonable accuracy.