Transforming a car manufacturing plant entering its seventh decade into a future-proof facility, ready for AI-powered autonomous driving, comes with inherent challenges. Among them: 1960s architectural drawings—and the royal system. “We had to survey everything and go out with a tape measure,” explains Dan Ford, site director of the Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) site in Halewood, Merseyside, England. “But the dimensions of the drawing were off: we hit a drain pipe.”
Apart from that minor bump in the road (work was delayed by 48 hours due to British weather and rain in August), JLR’s £250 million ($323.4 million) upgrade of its Halewood plant has been smooth sailing. Just off the River Mersey, 10 miles from Liverpool, Halewood has long been synonymous with the British car industry — and JLR is the UK’s largest automotive employer. (of the company The controversial Jaguar Type 00 to be built in a separate factory in Solihull) opened in 1963 by Ford of Britain to build the Anglia (served as the flying car in the small family saloon Harry Potter series), plans to replace the plant began in late 2020. Ford’s team reduced the tape measure to a digital twin, scanning a 1,000 square meter (10,764 square foot) footprint, floor to ceiling, every weekend.
Hellwood is now modded for future cars. Ford says that 750 robots (“our version of the Terracotta Army”), laser alignment technology, and cloud-based infrastructure join 3,500 JLR employees on the factory floor, creating 32,364 square meters (348,363 square feet) of production for the manufacturer. ) is expanded. Next generation vehicles. The new calibration rigs measure the responsiveness of a vehicle’s advanced driver-assistance systems, such as its cameras and sensors. Ford says safety levels can be calibrated for future autonomous driving.
The first phase of Halewood’s redevelopment was its new body shop, with two floors separated by 2.5 meters (eight feet) of concrete for heavy machinery, capable of producing 500 vehicle bodies per day. The new build line is now in the commissioning phase: pre-production electrified mid-size SUVs are to be tested by 2025. Forty new autonomous mobile robots now help Halewood workers fit high-voltage batteries. Other additions include a £10 million ($12.9 million) automated painted body storage tower, stacking up to 600 vehicles, retrieved by cranes for 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, came into effect at the start of 2024 — 22 percent of all new car sales must be zero emissions. The law obliges the industry to accelerate electric vehicle production, leading to an effective ban on the sale of new petrol cars by 2035; The EU has similar rules. Each of JLR’s luxury marques will have a pure electric model by 2030, with the Range Rover Electric set for pre-order (off the company’s only available battery-electric vehicle, the Jaguar I-Pace, launched in 2018). being done).
