Bentley readies 'revolutionary' car manufacturing

Bentley believes it has found a way to break free of the traditional assembly line in which one car follows the other.

The UK ultraluxury brand is planning a line that adjusts to the wide variety of specifications it offers.

"It's revolutionary, really," Bentley CEO Adrian Hallmark told Automotive News Europe.

He believes the solution being prepared by the Volkswagen Group subsidiary taps into the long-promised digital revolution in automotive manufacturing.

"People talked a lot about Industry 4.0 but they never knew what it meant, so talk subsided," he said. "But digital replacing mechanical can transform the way we do things."

Bentley's plan is to place each car, starting with its new EV coming in 2025, on automated guided vehicles (AGVs). That way Bentley can vary the time each car spends at an assembly station.

Right now, that so-called "takt time" is fixed for each car, meaning a lack of flexibility particularly on the second of two lines at Bentley's factory in Crewe, England, used to build the Continental GT and Flying Spur.

"Every model, every body style, whether two-door, four-door, cabrio or coupe, 12-cylinder, six-cylinder hybrid or eight cylinder, left-hand drive, right-hand drive, personalized or standard. They all go down the same system at the same speed," Hallmark said. "The complexity in that cell and the rigidity of our 9.15-minute takt time means that if one thing goes wrong, the whole system stops."

Using AGVs instead of a standard conveyor belt system means the takt time for each car can vary. The line can stretch out or concertina together. Cars can also overtake one another, creating so-called "stillwater" areas where extra time can be spent on more complicated models.

"You can basically systemize the highest level of personalization without slowing down the main line," Hallmark said.

Bentley has defined the benchmark process for the system within the VW Group. In doing so it has proved the brand "can industrialize complexity," Hallmark said.

Lamborghini uses AGVs to build its best-selling Urus SUV, but Hallmark says Bentley has taken the process to a higher level with the flexible takt-time.

The overall takt-time will come down, Hallmark claims, speeding up production and further boosting productivity at the automaker.

The idea of cars leapfrogging one another along the production line isn't new in the world of small-scale UK specialist car manufacturing.

However, that mainly involves bodies mounted on wheeled "dollies" and pushed by employees to the next assembly station.

Bentley's 10,000-plus annual production has warranted a conveyor belt, but at the expensive of flexibility -- and often profit. The automaker believes the AGV system promises the best of both worlds.

Hallmark says Bentley is yet to award supply contracts for the system, but robotics company ABB is one possibility. The Swiss firm is expanding its offering for automakers wanting similar flexibility by creating a system whereby assembly stations are replaced with cells into which bodies are brought by AGVs.

Also replacing conveyor belts with flexible cells is UK electric van startup Arrival, which plans to run its system for the first time later this year as production starts in its first so-called "microfactory." Its vans are moved cell-to-cell by AGVs, or what it calls AMRs (autonomous mobile robots).

"Because the AMRs don't follow a predestined path, the order in which the technology cells are used is under software control and can be changed from vehicle to vehicle," the company wrote in its annual report earlier this year.

This way the company breaks the linear process of assembly and, like Bentley, gets to vary the speed of production and optimize it for the model being produced.

Arrival employed Italian automation specialist Comau for the design and simulation of its microfactory, it said.

The company's vans have been specially designed for the factory process, rather than the other way around, which the company hopes will increase productivity by making the process simpler. The proof will be in the company's first production van from its plant in Bicester, southern England, due in the third quarter.

The transformation taking place in manufacturing is "underappreciated," Magna International CEO Swamy Kotagiri said.

"Automation and robotics are substantial parts of the business. They will impact how we run the factories and how the factories will look in the future," Kotagiri, who leads the world's fourth largest supplier, told Automotive News Europe. "This big, big transformation will determine who is going to be successful in the future."