The Global Industrial Review: A visit to AUDI automotive plant & headquarter

I had the opportunity recently to spend an fine afternoon visiting an AUDI plant with a friend from Singapore. Even though after working in automotive industries for many years, a visit to an automotive plant is always interesting. To me, automotive plants are such complex system that no matter how many times I have visited them, there are new things to see. The plant we visited was AUDI's flagship plant in Ingolstadt that manufactures the Audi A3, A4, A5 and Q5 series as well as bodies of TT coupé and roadster. As that was the first time visiting an AUDI plant, I actually anticipated a plant that would be more modern and trendy than my outdated memory of Daimler's automotive plants, where I used to work. To my disappointment, the AUDI plant could pass off as just like another Daimler plant. I guess, modern automotive plants in Germany, regardless of brands, look more and less the same nowadays.

Audi AG Forum (Credit: Audi AG)

The visit began with a 15 minutes video introduction of the history of Audi and its current global footprint. In the visit, there were also other visitors who were receiving their brand-new AUDIs on that day as well as visitors like us who were simply interested in how AUDIs were born. We were then ushered to collect our headsets so that the plant tour guide didn't have to compete with the rumbling background noises during our visit. Fortunately, we had an excellent female guide, who gave such a good technical explanations of the production technologies. From the types of questions posed from the visitors, I was pretty sure that many of the visitors in our group were engineers as well. I guess it's tough to be a good plant tour guide in the Land of Engineers. Nevertheless, the tour guide put up really a good show by answering tough questions confidently and with high level of enthusiasm. I guessed her job title as a tour guide was really understated. Maybe AUDI engineers do get a chance to become guides once a while, hmm......

The first station was body stamping station, where we saw the gigantic press machine (3000 to 7000 ton) stamping flat steel sheets in multiple stages until they looked like parts of car body. The process is fully automated with only a few workers, who did the monitoring and fork lifting of materials before and after the stamping station. Interesting, the tools used in the machine were carefully color coded to prevent mixing up between old and new molds. We have been told that these molds have specific life-spans and are required to be refurbished at regular interval.

Gigantic metal sheet stamping machine - blue colored blocks are the molds (Credit: Schuler AG)

The second station was body shop, where we found army of robots welding the stamped body parts into the form of a car. Here, the precision of automotive manufacturing during the entire tour was most felt. We could see the robots, in eerily noiseless, assembling the body parts and conducting spot welding. Moreover, we also saw the more elaborate laser welding on the car roof with the side shells.

The third station was paint shop, where the welded car bodies were prepared, painted and polished. Here, a total of 5 layers of surface treatment were given to ensure the shiny and deep surface finish look on all AUDI. The painting process was quite unique as the entire car bodies were rotated 360 degree and dived like submarines into the cathodic electro-phoretic bath before surfacing for further layers of paint.

Electro-dip painting station (Credit: Dürr AG)

The third station of the tour was the final assembly, where the empty painted car bodies were equipped with all the "organs" and "muscles". The assembly line consists basically of 2 parallel sub-lines. One for the chassis that includes the dynamic modules like suspensions, engines, transmission and drive shafts. One for the bodies and interior modules like dashboard, seats, windows and upholstery. At one point, the two "sub-lines" merge at a station that the Audi (and also the Daimler) workers affectionately called the "Hochzeit" (marriage). At the "Hochzeit" station, the body was lowered and attached to the chassis using just 12 bolts. After this station, the wheels were assembled onto the cars and readied for the final station.

"Hochzeit" (marriage) station between chassis and body (Credit: Audi AG)

The final station of the tour was function test and quality check. Here, the engines of the assembled cars were started and a roll test sequence was carried out to check the key functions. After which, quality inspectors did a final visual check on the interior and exterior under bright fluorescent lamps before signing the finished cars off for delivery.

All in all, the tour took about 2 hours, which certainly didn't feel like it. Overall, the tour was less interesting than I had expected, but it was nonetheless time well spent. I guess the most important takeaway I gained from this visit was that automotive production is still one of the most remarkable icons of production complexity, technologies and supply chain designs. This visit did refresh my production knowledge a little since I left the automotive industry four years ago.