Nissan is building factories that are smarter and cleaner
Nissan is well-known as the pioneer of affordable electric cars with its LEAF, and its ambitious plans to expand its EV fleet are known and applauded. EVs are the future, cheaper to run, faster than comparative ICE cars and, of course, good for the environment. Soon they will be cheaper to produce than ICE cars too.
Yet at the moment EVs are built in factories designed to make ICE cars, emitting carbon dioxide and other pollutants like there need be no tomorrow. Also, producing EVs in an ICE factory is like baking cakes in a smithy – you can, but it will be expensive and probably taste of soot.
To this end, Nissan is spending $1.2 billion on new technologies to make its factories more efficient, less pollutant and able to produce EVs next to ICE cars cost-effectively. It is using its Tochigi plant north of Tokyo as a technology and industrial testbed for this, and has spent over $300m there over the last two years.
It is called the Intelligent Factory Initiative and Nissan plans to expand it to its Oppama and Kyushu factories in Japan and the Canton and Smyrna plants in the USA. Much of it is very new and expensive technology and the new equipment will be introduced to the initial sites over seven years.
The thing about implementing meaningful change, whether the aim is environmental or financial or technological is that it has to be done at scale to mean anything. A few years ago there was a story about people reintroducing sailing ships, and it sounded great until you looked at the size of the ships and realised how futile it was.
The Tochigi factory is 2.9m square metres, around 58 rugby fields, so any change that happens there will happen in a very significant way. For example, Nissan plans new automation and using electricity from fuel cells and renewables to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 41% by 2030. It will also use Virtual/mixed Reality equipment for training and people will monitor the production line from a special room. In the event of a problem, crews with camera headsets and tablets will race to the area and be guided by the monitors on how to fix the problem, reducing recovery and repair time by about 30%.
The flagship Ariya, a crossover EV, will be among the 12 new models made at this factory. For both EVs and ICE cars, automated pallets will be used to take the diverse components to the right place. As a world first, Nissan will replace the magnets in the Ariya’s electric motor with tightly-wound copper wire. This will not only improve the efficiency of the motor at high speed but will reduce the need for expensive and supply-risky rare earth metals.
Changing the way we make things to improve matters will take a concerted effort across many companies, industries and countries to achieve. Nissan, in using its industrial muscle and technological knowledge at scale, is a pioneer in doing exactly this.
