HYUNDAI

South Korean giant bets on microfactories with 100 employees and many robot dogs

For decades, car manufacturers, after testing other options, have found that large production runs reduce costs per unit manufactured. One of the best-known examples was Fiat with the Uno, and the solution continued to prevail even in electric vehicles, as is the case with Tesla in Shanghai, where 750,000 Model 3 and Y vehicles are produced per year, with the aim of achieving a million soon. Robotization opens the door to new solutions and strategies, with Hyundai defending microfactories, capable of manufacturing just 30,000 units/year, but with only 100 employees and… many robot dogs.

Hyundai and Tesla are among the manufacturers with the biggest investments in the area of robotization, the Americans in construction robots – they acquired a German manufacturer specializing in robots capable of positioning parts in vehicles, welding them or gluing them, and are also developing the humanoid Optimus Gen 2 –, and the South Koreans in operational robots – bought Boston Dynamics, the largest specialists in robots with humanoid shapes or with four legs. Both envision the machines helping in the car factories of the future, which Hyundai is already able to do today.

The microfactories that the South Koreans defend are not a mere utopia, but the purest of realities, as the system is already working in the brand's most recent factory, in Singapore. Those responsible say that large factories, with thousands of employees and capable of producing hundreds of thousands of vehicles, continue to make sense, giving as an example Tesla's Gigafactory Texas, which produces 250,000 units from an area of 930,000 m2 and 20,000 employees . By comparison, the Hyundai factory, from which exclusively electric vehicles such as the Ioniq 5 and 6 are produced, produces 30,000 units annually on land with just 87,000 m2 and 100 employees.

In addition to the 300 cars/employee ratio seeming attractive, compared to Tesla's 12.5 in Texas (it's 37.5 in Shanghai), it remains to be seen the cost ratios, which will be decidedly less interesting. However, Hyundai claims that close to large urban centers, where land is expensive and availability is lower, microfactories are the best option.

The South Korean brand's factory in Singapore adopted a type of production on islands, along which vehicles move, instead of the continuous in-line manufacturing of larger production facilities, with a very high level of robotization. And, by using the Spot robot dog, Hyundai now has another tool at its disposal to control the production line. Equipped with cameras associated with an artificial intelligence system, Spot can check the correct assembly of certain parts, evaluate gaps and everything else that can confirm compliance with the standards imposed by Hyundai.

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