New Chinese vehicle factory revels in its remoteness
While car workers in Germany and South Korea fight to save their jobs, one of China’s youngest car brands is gearing up to build sport utility vehicles at a new factory with robots and a fresh workforce of 1,800 people.
A three-hour drive from the Chinese capital Beijing, the Lynk plant in Zhangjiakou combines technology and manufacturing know-how from the Geely and Volvo Cars units of China car giant Zhejiang Geely Holding Group.
The 12 billion yuan (Dh6.94bn) investment is a bright, freshly painted example of the challenge confronting long-established car factories in mature industrial economies.
As car makers adopt a new generation of manufacturing technology, industry officials are confident they can deploy the same packages of robots, assembly line designs and digital quality control systems anywhere in the world – and train people to do the tasks robots cannot yet perform.
Plant manager Tong Xiangbei is in the vanguard of a tech revolution that enables car makers to put new factories in remote places like Zhangjiakou, a city of four million people in Hebei province and far from many of Geely’s parts makers.
“With this team, we could go anywhere and replicate this factory,” Mr Tong, 42, who previously worked at Ford, says during the first media tour of the factory. The ability to build cars in almost any location that has electricity and decent roads is one factor behind Peugeot’s clash with German workers over proposed cost-cutting at Opel brand factories once owned by General Motors.
GM this week agreed to invest $3.6bn in its money-losing South Korean operations only after unions representing workers at its plants agreed to allow the shutdown of a factory in Gunsan, Korea and gave concessions GM said would save $400 million to $500m a year.
With Lynk, Geely is targeting younger and less-affluent buyers than typical Volvo customers, but who still demand more sophistication and technology than a standard Geely car for the mass market in China. Lynk vehicles already are competing with GM, Peugeot and other car makers in China.
The brand plans to begin production at a plant in Belgium in 2019, and begin sales in Europe in 2020. Geely and Volvo have said they plan to bring the brand to the United States, but have not said when.
The Zhangjiakou complex will build the Lynk 02 4x4 and a sedan called the 03 for the Chinese market. Currently, the plant has about 1,800 workers on one daily shift, working alongside nearly 300 robots.
When the factory goes to a second shift, it will employ 3,000 people capable of building about 200,000 cars per year, Mr Tong says. Those are employment and production levels consistent with mature market car plants.
The factory uses Kuka robots to weld together the bodies of its vehicles – the same brand used by Daimler to build Mercedes-Benz cars.
US company Rockwell Automation and Germany’s Robert Bosch supply the technology used on the final assembly line. A robot from ABB glues windshields into each Lynk 02, relieving human workers of that messy job.
US tool maker Atlas Copco provided a nut runner that bolts wheels on vehicles, records the force used and sends the data to a cloud server.
The Zhangjiakou factory’s advanced systems are evident in both the robots seen by journalists during the tour, and other things that are missing.
Unlike many older car factories, there are no natural-gas fuelled forklifts or tug vehicles operated by drivers to haul parts to the assembly line.
At Lynk, parts are brought to workstations by unmanned machines. For its human workforce, some of whom live up to 500 kilometres from the plant, the company is building housing, Mr Tong says.
But he also sees benefits in the plant’s remote location.
“We’re in the middle of nowhere,” he says. “We can expand any direction we want.”