The charm of a product may be more intuitive for consumers, but for industry, the place where the product was born is where the charm lies.
With the improvement of car manufacturing technology and the increasing number of local brands, cars have become a necessity for most households. In terms of sales, in 2023, China's automobile production and sales reached 30.161 million and 30.094 million respectively, with year-on-year growth of 11.6% and 12%. Among them, the production and sales of new energy vehicles reached 9.587 million and 9.495 million, respectively, with a year-on-year increase of 35.8% and 37.9%, and a market share of 31.6%.
With the increase in car sales, product quality has also become the most concerning topic for consumers today. As the saying goes, "if you want to do something good, you must first sharpen your tools." Advanced product manufacturing and intelligent management are also important factors for automotive companies in market competition.
On January 11th, a reporter from Huaxia Times visited NIO's second advanced manufacturing base in the Xinqiao Intelligent Electric Vehicle Industrial Park in Hefei to deeply explore the core advantages of NIO Intelligent Manufacturing.
Efficient production, 100% automated connection process
In the consumer market, the term customization is mostly used for clothing, shoes, furniture, etc. These products all have one thing in common, which is high-end. In the automotive industry, customization can also be applied throughout the entire product, such as body color, interior color, specific configurations, etc. As a high-end brand of new energy, NIO has also taken personalized customization to the extreme.
According to NIO, there are currently 3592320 personalized configurations arranged and combined among the eight NIO NT2.0 platform models. In NIO's view, in the current era of intelligent electric vehicles, the demand for high-end personalization is necessary, especially in the range of over 300000 yuan.
So, in the face of nearly 3.6 million personalized configurations, how can NIO manage them to avoid errors in the production and manufacturing process? With these questions in mind, the reporter arrived at NIO's second advanced manufacturing base. It is understood that the base has four major process workshops: stamping, vehicle body, painting, and final assembly. It adopts multiple fully automatic intelligent equipment and innovative processes, which can enable the factory to operate normally in a "black light" state.
In the painting workshop, the reporter saw a scene similar to a "three-dimensional garage", where various styles and colors of car bodies were accommodated in the parking space. The most common car model was the ET5T. When producing vehicles, robots will automatically grab the body of the vehicle, giving a feeling of "grabbing dolls". According to the staff, the platform called "Rubik's Cube" has a total of 408 parking spaces on 6 floors. Due to the abundance of NIO colors, in order to ensure personalized user selection and improve efficiency. Under the empowerment of the Rubik's Cube, it is possible to paint 20 white car bodies at once and store them in a three-dimensional library for subsequent assembly after order allocation. This approach eliminates the need for "first in, first out", shortens sorting time, reduces production pauses, and reduces process distance by 20%.
Arriving at the final assembly workshop, the reporter saw the world's first "enclave" automatic assembly island. Many personalized customizations such as tailgate and panoramic sunroof are assembled here. Unlike traditional vehicle assembly processes, NIO's assembly process does not require a large amount of manual operation and achieves a high degree of automation. During the production process, unmanned delivery vehicles transport the vehicle body that needs to be assembled and processed to the automatic assembly island, which is then installed by a robotic arm and transported to the production line by unmanned delivery vehicles.
In addition to being more efficient, this approach also has high accuracy. For example, in the four door installation process, the assembly time of the robotic arm is less than 100 seconds, with a positive and negative error of only 0.5 millimeters, and is not limited by the vehicle model, which can adapt to flexible mixed line production of multiple vehicle models.
During the visit, the reporter's biggest impression was that multiple robots in the workshop worked together to achieve high intelligence production. According to the staff, the body workshop of NIO's second advanced manufacturing base is equipped with 756 robots, achieving a 100% automation rate.
So, how does NIO control so many robots to work synchronously? It is understood that at the beginning of the establishment of the factory, NIO buried 90 kilometers of 100G optical fiber underground. And currently, the bandwidth of mainstream luxury brand factories is only around 5-10G. With the support of high bandwidth and NIO's "Tiangong" system, staff only need to hold an intelligent torque gun under the guidance of a digital position screen to achieve the tightening operation of traditional factory components. This means that young people who want to "screw" and lie flat have lost their job opportunities here. It is worth mentioning that under high intelligence production, it only takes 14 days for a car to go from production to production.
Efficient collaboration, with components directly connected to the workshop
If NIO's production factory is the crystallization of intelligence, then the air transportation corridor connecting the factory and supply chain manufacturers is the physical "plug-in" of NIO's efficient production.
As the visit deepened, the reporter learned that in addition to NIO, there are also 10 component suppliers in the entire Hefei Xinqiao Intelligent Electric Vehicle Industrial Park, including Andaotuo, Li'er Seats, and Shangsheng Electronics, all of which are NIO's supply partners. After these suppliers produce tires, seats, and other components, they can be transported to the final assembly workshop through an air transportation corridor with NIO factories. This not only saves transportation costs, but also allows components to enter the production line faster. According to the official introduction, this type of machine transportation chain delivery saves 400 yuan/vehicle in single vehicle logistics costs compared to traditional logistics models.
According to the plan, a battery factory will also be built around the F2 factory. Batteries are high-risk items with very high transportation costs. After the battery factory is built, they can also be transported into the factory, greatly reducing transportation costs.
In addition, NIO's savings are not only reflected in transportation. The construction of the entire Neo Park adheres to the principles of environmental protection, energy conservation, and low-carbon. All large-scale roofs are covered with photovoltaic solar panels, and according to the plan, the annual power generation can reach 48 million kilowatt hours. This not only saves 25% of the electricity required for factory production, but also reduces carbon dioxide emissions.
Official data shows that from January to September 2023, positive photovoltaics contributed 40.79 million kilowatt hours of electricity, generating an average of 150000 kilowatt hours of electricity per day, equivalent to the annual electricity consumption of 17000 urban households (calculated at 200 kilowatt hours per household per month).
At the same time, NIO has also implemented paperless production throughout the entire process. In the past, assembly orders in front of vehicles were displayed on the screen in front of workstations at NIO's second advanced manufacturing base. According to NIO's calculations, it can save about 3 million A4 papers per year, equivalent to 100 trees aged 15 years.
Neo Park also has the concept of sponge factory. According to the staff, the designed surface runoff recovery rate of the park will reach 75%. Even though it will experience several rainstorm in the summer of 2023, in the inland city of Hefei, Neo Park will not form waterlogging, which will affect production.
According to the plan, in addition to the second advanced manufacturing base, the third and fourth manufacturing bases are also under NIO's planning (production internal codes are Alps and Fireflies). With the construction of more factories, the synonyms of intelligence, efficiency, fine craftsmanship, and low-carbon sustainability may become another highlight of NIO.