Lynk & CO plant in Zhangjiakou

This brand new high technology/ultra-modern plant combines technology and manufacturing know-how from the Geely and Volvo Cars units of China auto giant Zhejiang Geely Holding Group.

The 12 billion yuan (USD1.89 billion) investment is a bright, freshly painted example of the challenge confronting long-established auto factories in mature industrial economies.

As automakers adopt a new generation of manufacturing technology, industry officials are confident that they can deploy the same packages of robots, assembly line designs and digital quality control systems anywhere in the world – and train people to do the tasks robots cannot yet perform.

Plant manager Tong Xiangbei is in the vanguard of a tech revolution that enables automakers to put new factories in remote places like Zhangjiakou, a city of four million people in Hebei province and far from many of Geely’s parts makers.

With Lynk & CO, Geely is targeting younger and less affluent buyers than typical Volvo customers, but who still demand more sophistication and technology than a standard Geely Automobile Holdings car for the mass market in China.

The Zhangjiakou complex will build the Lynk & CO 02 SUV and a sedan called the 03 for the Chinese market. Currently, the plant has about 1,800 workers on one daily shift, labouring alongside nearly 300 robots. When the factory goes to a second shift, it will employ 3,000 people capable of building about 200,000 cars per year, Tong said. Those are employment and production levels consistent with mature market auto plants.

The factory uses Kuka robots to weld together the bodies of its vehicles – the same brand used by Daimler to build Mercedes-Benz cars.

U.S. firm Rockwell Automation and Germany’s Robert Bosch supply the technology used on the final assembly line.

A robot from ABB glues windshields into each Lynk & CO 02, relieving human workers of that messy job.

U.S. tool maker Atlas Copco provided what plant manager Tong describes as a “huge-ass nut runner” that bolts wheels on vehicles, records the force used and sends the data to a cloud server.

The Zhangjiakou factory’s advanced systems are evident in both the robots seen by journalists during the tour, and other things that are missing.

Unlike many older auto factories, there are no natural gas fuelled forklifts or tug vehicles operated by drivers to haul parts to the assembly line. At Lynk & CO, parts are brought to work stations by unmanned, automated machines.

For its human workforce, some of whom live up to 500 km (311 miles) from the plant, the company is building housing for its employees, Tong said. But he also saw benefits in the plant’s remote location. “We’re in the middle of nowhere,” he said. “We can expand any direction we want.”