Transforming an automobile manufacturing plant entering its seventh decade into a future-proof facility ready for AI-powered autonomous driving comes with natural challenges. Among them: architectural drawings from the 60s and the imperial system. “We had to inspect everything and go out with the tape measure,” explains Dan Ford, site manager for Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) in Halewood, Merseyside, England. “But the measurements on the drawing were wrong: we hit a drain pipe.”
Aside from that minor bump in the road (British weather and a downpour in August meant work was delayed 48 hours), JLR’s £250 million ($323.4 million) upgrade to its Halewood plant has gone smoothly . Facing the River Mersey, 10 miles from Liverpool, Halewood has long been synonymous with the British automotive industry, and JLR is the UK’s largest automotive employer. (The company’s controversial Jaguar Type 00 will be built at a different factory in Solihull.) Opened in 1963 by Ford of Great Britain to build the Anglia (the small family saloon that played the role of the flying car of the harry potter series), plans to transform the plant began in late 2020. The Ford team ditched the tape measure for a digital twin, scanning 1,000 square meters (10,764 square feet) of footprint, from floor to ceiling, every weekend.
Halewood has now been modified for the cars of the future. A fleet of 750 robots (“our version of the Terracotta Army,” says Ford), laser alignment technology and cloud-based infrastructure unite 3,500 JLR employees at the factory, expanded by 32,364 square meters (348,363 square feet) to produce the manufacturer’s products. latest generation vehicles. The new calibration equipment measures the responsiveness of a vehicle’s advanced driver assistance systems, such as its cameras and sensors. Safety levels can be calibrated for future autonomous driving, Ford says.
The first stage of Halewood’s redevelopment was its new body shop, with two floors separated by 2.5 meters (eight feet) of concrete to house heavy machinery, capable of producing 500 vehicle bodies per day. The new construction line is now in the commissioning stage: electrified mid-size SUVs in pre-production will be tested until 2025. Forty new autonomous mobile robots are now helping Halewood employees install high-voltage batteries. Other additions include a £10 million ($12.9 million) automated painted body storage tower, which stacks up to 600 vehicles, retrieved by cranes for just-in-time customer orders.
Halewood is JLR’s first all-electric facility. The UK government’s zero-emission vehicle mandate, part of its transition plan to a net-zero economy, came into effect in early 2024: 22 percent of all new car sales must be zero-emission. The law has forced the industry to effectively accelerate the production of electric vehicles, leading to an effective ban on the sale of new gasoline cars by 2035; The EU has similar regulations in place. Each of JLR’s luxury brands will have a purely electric model by 2030, with the Range Rover Electric ready for pre-orders (the company’s only available battery electric vehicle, the Jaguar I-Pace, launched in 2018, is discontinued ).
