Transforming a 70-year-old auto manufacturing plant into a future-proof facility ready for AI-powered autonomous driving comes with its own set of challenges. These include architectural drawings from the 1960s and the imperial system. “We had to research everything and go out with a tape measure,” explains Dan Ford, Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) site director in Halewood, Merseyside, UK. “But the dimensions on the drawing were off. It ended up colliding with a drainage pipe.”
JLR’s £250m ($323.4m) refurbishment of its Halewood factory is on track despite some challenges – heavy UK weather and August rains delayed work by 48 hours Proceeded to. Located off the coast of the River Mersey, 16 miles from Liverpool, Halewood has long been synonymous with the British car industry, with JLR the UK’s largest car employer. (The company’s controversial Jaguar Type 00 is produced at a separate factory in Solihull). Plans began at the end of 2020 to transform the factory, which was opened in 1963 by Britain’s Ford to manufacture the Anglia, a small family saloon that appeared as a flying car in the Harry Potter series. Ford’s team ditched the tape measure and replaced it with a digital twin to do the scanning. 1,000 square meters (10,764 square feet) from floor to ceiling every weekend.
Hailwood is currently being modified for future automobiles. 750 robots (“our version of the Terracotta Warriors,” Ford says), laser alignment technology, and cloud-based infrastructure will be expanded by 32,364 square meters (348,363 square feet) to produce the manufacturer’s products. joins 3,500 JLR employees on the factory floor. Next generation vehicle. The new calibration rig measures the responsiveness of a vehicle’s advanced driver assistance systems, such as cameras and sensors. Ford says it can adjust safety levels for future self-driving cars.
The first phase of Halewood’s redevelopment will be a new body shop, with two floors separated by 2.5 meters (8 feet) of concrete to allow for heavy equipment, and capable of producing 500 bodies per day. Masu. The new production line is currently in the commissioning phase, and the pre-production electric midsize SUV will be tested until 2025. Currently, 40 new autonomous mobile robots are helping Halewood employees install high-voltage batteries. Other additions include a 10 million pound ($12.9 million) automated paint body storage tower that will hold up to 600 vehicles and retrieve them by crane on just-in-time customer orders.
Halewood is JLR’s first all-electric facility. The UK government’s zero-emission vehicle mandate, part of its plan to transition to a net-zero economy, will come into force in early 2024 and will require 22% of all new car sales to be zero-emission vehicles. The law effectively accelerated the industry’s production of electric vehicles, effectively banning the sale of new gasoline-powered vehicles by 2035. The EU has similar regulations. Each of JLR’s luxury cars is scheduled to introduce pure electric models by 2030, with the Range Rover Electric scheduled to begin accepting pre-orders (the company’s only available battery electric vehicle, which will be launched in 2018). Production of the Jaguar I-Pace that was released is scheduled to be discontinued).
