Since the Zhejiang Geely Holding Group (Geely) acquired a 49.9% share in Proton in 2017, the Malaysian carmaker has been steadily regaining its strength in the domestic market. With new models like the X70 and X50, sales have kept rising although the COVID-19 pandemic slowed the trend last year.
Once the dominant brand in the market, Proton has been at No.2 for over 15 years and has been determined to regain its top position. With a strong sales month and more vehicles being available for delivery in September, the volume of 14,872 units (domestic + export) took the cumulative total volume for three quarters of 2022 to 102,353 units.
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Perodua’s deliveries in the third quarter of 2022 increased as the automotive supply chain continues to improve and more vehicles can be completed. The Malaysian carmaker delivered a total of 69,011 units nationwide, an increase of 5% compared to the volume for the second quarter of the year.
Commenting on the improvement, Perodua’s President & CEO, Dato’ Sri Zainal Abidin Ahmad, said: “The increase in registration in this quarter shows that most of the major issues within the automotive supply chain have normalised. It is now time to further improve on production as we need to reduce the waiting period for our valued customers.,”
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Additional choices of electrically-powered cars will be in showrooms soon with the start of production of new models from Volvo and BMW. From the Swedish carmaker’s factory in Belgium is the XC40 Recharge while BMW has begun rolling out its new iX3 at the BMW Brilliance Automotive joint venture (BBA) in China.
Volvo XC40 Recharge
The XC40 Recharge is the first of several fully electric Volvos to come. By 2025, Volvo expects 50% of its global sales to consist of fully electric cars, with the rest hybrids. Customer demand for the XC40 Recharge has been strong and at this time, every car to be built during this calendar year has already been sold. First deliveries to customers in Europe will commence later this month.
As a fully electric version of the popular XC40 SUV, the XC40 Recharge is based on the Compact Modular Architecture (CMA), an advanced vehicle platform co-developed within the Geely Group. It has a projected range of over 400 kms on a fully charged battery pack which can be charged to 80% capacity within about 40 minutes (with a fast-charger system).
The XC40 Recharge, Volvo’s first model to win the ‘European Car of the Year’ title, has the typically high safety standards the brand has been known for. However, being a EV without a conventional engine means it has a different architecture and Volvo engineers have reinforced the frontal section to address that issue.
The battery pack is protected by a safety cage embedded in the middle of the car’s body structure. Its placement in the floor of the car also lowers the centre of gravity of the car, for better protection against roll-overs.
BMW iX3
The fully-electric iX3 is the first pure electric model from the BMW brand. The iX3 has been developed under the strategic “Power of Choice” approach to cover broad spread of customer requirements and statutory regulations around the world.
It has fifth-generation BMW eDrive technology with major progress made in terms of power density, operating range, weight, installation space requirement and flexibility. Electric motor, power electronics and transmission arranged in a central housing for the first time. The claimed operating range is between 460 kms and 520 kms, depending on the test cycle used).
Power transfer is to the rear wheels from the eDrive electric motor which produces maximum output of 286 ps/400 Nm. This gives the SUV a 0 to 100 km/h acceleration time claimed to be 6.8 seconds which is close to that of the X3 30i that does the same run in 6.4 seconds.
The iX3 will be the brand’s first model to also be produced for export at the joint venture factory in China. As well as intelligent manufacturing and state-of-the-art technologies, the production facility in Shenyang is also distinguished by its comprehensive quality management system.
A special ‘zero defect concept’ ensures that the globally high market requirements for electric mobility are met. There is rigorous testing of everything from the battery to the finished car to guarantee the vehicle safety. These include 128 mechanical tests and 994 software functionality tests ensure the high quality of the high-voltage battery packs throughout the entire lifecycle. Another 140 functional tests check every aspect of the vehicle during acceleration, in particular road conditions and on rocky roads.
Manufacturing technology in the Japanese auto industry has been constantly improving, enabling carmakers to deliver products that are of higher quality. Initially, the technologies were used in Japan but with the globalisation of the industry today, factories all over the planet also serve as production hubs for certain models, so they too need to have the best technologies for making their vehicles.
In view of this, Nissan will make a substantial investment in advanced technologies and equipment for its factories around the world. Following an initial investment of about 33 billion yen at the company’s Tochigi Plant in Japan, the technologies will be rolled out across factories globally.
Necessary for new generation of vehicles
These innovations will help deliver a new generation of electrified and intelligent automobiles (like the Nissan LEAF pictured above) that embody the company’s Nissan Intelligent Mobility vision, while also making production operations more flexible, efficient and sustainable. This latest investment represents a necessary rethinking of conventional car-making and tackles the structural and technical challenges of producing vehicles that will lead the industry in a new era of electrification and intelligence.
“We’re facing an unprecedented evolution in the capabilities of our vehicles,” said Hideyuki Sakamoto, Nissan’s Executive Vice-President on charge of manufacturing and supply chain management. “Our job is to make this evolution a reality by rethinking how we build cars. This will also mean shifting the efforts of our expert technicians from techniques they’ve already mastered to new, unexplored areas.”
Building the future of mobility
Nissan’s next generation of cars will be electrified, intelligent and connected. They will be ‘electronics-dense’ and use many materials which are new. This adds new complexity to design and construction, requiring major advancements in production engineering.
One such advancement is the Universal Powertrain Mounting System (shown above) developed by Nissan’s Production Engineering Research and Development Centre. Mounting powertrains in cars is a lengthy process and strenuous work for assembly line staff, who must install multiple components in sequence. Nissan’s new system uses an automated pallet to mount the entire powertrain at once.
The system measures the car’s dimensions in real time during mounting, and the pallet makes micro-adjustments accordingly. This ensures that powertrains are installed to within a small fraction of a millimetre’s accuracy. The new system is also highly adaptable. The same pallet can mount three types of powertrains (internal combustion engine, e-POWER and pure electric), and can assemble and mount 27 different powertrain module combinations.
Bringing craftsmanship to robots
Robots have the advantage of high-speed production and consistent quality, enabling faster and higher output of vehicles. However, they are not so good when there are variations and Nissan has developed certain specialist skills and processes that, until now, could only be performed by trained craftspeople. Through an intensive collaborative process, Nissan’s craftspeople and engineers have digitized parts of these delicate processes and ‘trained’ robots to perform them around the clock. This will allow the craftspeople to focus on new, unexplored areas of expertise.
Making better workplaces with robots
When robots were first used, one of the benefits was that they could do jobs that were dangerous or strenuous for humans, like welding body parts together. Robots can perform such tasks efficiently, freeing workers to perform more valuable jobs elsewhere on the line. This also improves ergonomics, making factories easier places to work.
One example is the installation of a headliner, the overhead layer of material on the inside of a car’s roof. Workers must enter each vehicle’s cabin to perform this physically demanding job. The task has become even harder as cars come with more connected features, adding to the number of devices in and around the headliners.
Nissan’s solution is to use robots to insert the headliner through the front of the vehicle and then fasten it. Sensors monitor changes in pressure and use a proprietary logic system to determine when the clips have snapped securely into place.
Lower environmental impact
Nissan is also working to reduce the environmental impact of building cars. Changes in the painting process are especially noticeable. Car bodies must usually be painted at high temperatures because the viscosity of paint is hard to control at lower temperatures. By contrast, bumpers are made of plastic, so they need to be painted at low temperatures. This requires two separate painting processes for one vehicle.
Nissan has developed a water-based paint that maintains the right viscosity at low temperatures, so that bodies and bumpers can be painted together. This will cut carbon dioxide emissions from the process by 25%. Nissan will also use a water-free painting booth that makes it possible to collect all waste paint and reuse it in other production processes.
“These new technologies and innovations are at the heart of the company’s competitiveness,” said Sakamoto. “They will be rolled out globally in the coming years, underpinning the future of Nissan Intelligent Mobility and reinforcing our status as a leader in technology.”
Nissan has developed new technology to make custom body parts faster and at lower cost
For nearly as long as there have been cars, people have been collecting and customizing them. Until recently, however, if owners of classic cars wanted to replace a damaged bonnet or fender on an out-of-production model, they had to search through junkyards or hire a craftsman to make a one-off replacement (which might be costly).
Now, thanks to a new technology called dual-sided die-less forming, Nissan plans to offer original specification pieces at mass-production prices. Automakers traditionally form body parts by pressing sheet metal against specially created dies. Designing and building multiple dies for each part is expensive and only pays off after stamping a large volume of parts. This is why, for locally-assembled models, many body parts are imported from a bigger plant elsewhere as the volume locally is too small to justify the investment in huge stamping machines.
This basic process has remained largely unchanged since the early days of mass production of motor vehicles. It remains a stumbling block that prevents production of low-volume parts unless costs are raised.
Nissan’s new dual-sided die-less forming technology presents a compelling alternative to the investment-intensive industry norm. It does away with dies and stamping machines altogether, removing one of the most costly and time-consuming steps in auto body manufacturing.
Two robots better than one
The process involves two robots working on opposite sides of a flat sheet of metal. By syncing their movements precisely and using diamond-tipped tools developed by Nissan, the robots can shape the metal to a high degree of accuracy and detail. Working in tandem, two robots can produce intricate concave and convex shapes that could not be created if one robot were working from a single side of the sheet.
The new technique was made possible, thanks to the production engineering expertise at Nissan’s Production Engineering Research and Development Centre, along with advancements in materials technology by Nissan’s Research Division.
“About five years ago, we started thinking about ways of forming sheet metal without relying on dies,” said Keigo Oyamada, an assistant manager in Nissan’s vehicle manufacturing element engineering department, who oversaw the project. “Our goal was to solve the cost issues related to creating dies for small-volume production. We want to put this technology to use to create spare parts for old models whose dies have already been thrown away, or potentially even to let people order custom parts from Nissan.”
Performing a 3D scan of an existing part creates data that can be used to ‘teach’ the robots to build the scanned part — although some human guidance is still required. This approach will allow Nissan to produce parts that haven’t been made in decades, simply by scanning existing examples of those parts.
Custom parts – in just one week
Dual-sided die-less forming can be used to create custom body parts in less than a week, instead of waiting as long as a year for dies to be designed and manufactured. The process is also inherently adaptable; it can be used to produce small and large parts alike, as well as car parts other than body panels.
For now, Nissan plans to use dual-sided die-less forming to produce replacement parts for cars the company no longer sells. Looking further ahead, the company sees potential for creating customized parts for those who are looking to add a little uniqueness to their future rides.
For assistance in obtaining Nissan Genuine Parts in Malaysia, visit www.tceas.com.my.
Over 35 million Golfs in various versions have been produced worldwide since the first generation, 26 million of them at Volkswagen’s Wolfsburg plant in Germany. Now, the new generation –referred to as Golf 8 – is on the lines and the first cars will be in the showrooms in Germany and Austria in early December. The model will be launched on October 24.
To prepare for production, approximately 700 work steps were analyzed at over 400 workshops to leverage existing efficiency reserves. Numerous process improvements have been implemented to make sure the eighth generation of the bestseller can be built more efficiently than its predecessor.
The Golf 8 has over 2,700 individual parts and components with 962 wiring systems and 1,340 metres of cable. That is 31 wiring systems and just under 100 metres of cable more than in the Golf 7.
One hour cut in production time
“The Golf 8 is much more complex than its predecessor. Nevertheless, we have cut average manufacturing time by about one hour. Because the Golf 8 belongs to the second-generation of MQB products, we achieved a significant reduction in production investments. Our platform strategy is delivering. The team in Wolfsburg have given their all for the Golf 8. Production processes have become more efficient overall. That is a great achievement and I would like to say a big thank you to all employees,” said Dr. Andreas Tostmann, Volkswagen Brand Board Member for Production.
Due to greater standardization of plant and processes for the Golf 8, ramp-up investments for a successful start of production have been cut by more than half compared with the model’s predecessor. Total investments for the new Golf are in the mid three-digit million euro range. Given the current platform strategy, 80% of existing body shop plant and equipment can be used. New equipment has been installed for the side panels of the Golf 8 with their striking tornado line. This new plant is not only much more flexible but it is also 40% more productive.
Commissioning the Golf 8, i.e. installing all data, is fully automated and carried out via a fast WLAN network while the vehicle is still on the production line. As a result, manufacturing time for this process step remains unchanged even though the volume of data is higher. From next year, a new fully-automated generation of driverless transport systems will ensure the faster supply of material, a key factor in efficient factory processes. Body shop logistics will see a 7% improvement in productivity through the use of 23 transport robots. Incidentally, starting with delivery of the steel sheet, the Golf travels 69 kms on production lines until the finished car leaves the factory.
To know more about Volkswagen models available in Malaysia, visit www.volkswagen.com.my.
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