The cafeteria at the Honda Lincoln factory in Alabama feels as organised and efficient as the production lines running below. From the ketchup dispensers to the waste conveyor belt running around the room, eating here feels feintly automated.
It’s also a pleasant surprise to eat with the staff. Most factory tours culminate in a delicate lunch in a stuffy boardroom. Chowing down with the rest of the workers, everybody dressed in their Honda-regulation white overalls, gives the visitor a taste of the kind of flat structure the company tries to engender.
It’s a company culture that means anyone should be comfortable approaching Jeff Tomko, president of Honda Manufacturing Alabama, with an issue or idea when he’s walking the factory floor. This happens often, he says, although its doubtful he’s talked to every one of his plant’s 4,000 employees.
Honda’s Lincoln plant in Alabama is huge - spread over 3.7 million square feet. it has two main production lines, each 1.5 miles long, a dedicated engine production facility, a blanking and stamping facility with four presses, highly automated welding lines and injection moulding machines. The plant produces 1500 light trucks and SUVs (Sports Utility Vehicles) a day, mostly pickups destined for use in the southern states, and has a capacity of 340,000 vehicles a year. That’s around the same annual production as the BMW Mini plant in Oxford, UK, which exports cars all around the world.
Honda is one of many automotive companies that have made states like Alabama, Tennessee and Georgia their home over the last two decades. The trend has marked the ceding of the US vehicle market from the big three of General Motors, Ford and Chrysler, to Asian and European manufacturers. The move has also severely diminished Detroit as the focal point for automotive manufacturing in the US. Deep down in the American south, Japanese and German manufacturers like Mercedes-Benz, VW, Nissan and Toyota are employing younger, non-unionised workers to make an array of premium cars, economical compacts and trucks for both North and South America.
Honda Lincoln is a preeminent example of the US auto-industry’s transformation. The plant was opened in 2001. Last December it made its three millionth car. It’s flagship model is currently the Acura MDX, a premium seven-seater family SUV. The vehicle, says, Tomko, contains a high amount of electronics with features such as driver assistance systems and is the most technically advanced vehicle Honda produce in the US.
However, no matter how many electronics-enabled features it has, a car still needs to be built from metal. The coils of steel from AMNS Calvert sitting in the factory’s blanking facility serve as a reminder that on average 63% of any vehicle is made from this base metal alloy.
Honda Lincoln has recently installed this new servo press which enables greater formability of body parts
The steel coils are fed into a giant press to create blanks. After which the blanks are shaped into vehicle body parts by either one of two hydraulic presses or a servo press. The servo press, which was installed last year, is more energy-efficient and allows for stronger vehicle bodies and new design features. It gives engineers more control over the stamping process – it can impact quickly and then press slowly. Each impact is called a shot – the facility typically performs around 30,000 shots a day.
Tomko says: “We can program and control the open and close speed of the servo press for either steel or aluminium and adjust differently based on the changes in the material. We can develop a part much quicker, with the ability to control pressure at each stage of the stamping process, giving us better formability, better design features and reducing the amount of cracks that we would have from applying one severe type of pressure.”
The servo press is an investment that allows designers a freer hand when designing new cars. Robert ZumMallen, chief engineer of Body Design for Honda R&D Americas, says that styling is still the most important aspect of a car. “It has to appeal to the customer,” he says. “A lot of times the styling limits the materials we can use because of the characteristics stylists want. The stylists want very extreme shapes and we can’t give them everything they want in an ordinary panel. There are compromises that have to be made.”
Honda Lincoln has two production lines, both 1.5 miles long
The other benefit of the servo press is that it enable engineers to use advanced high strength steels, such as Usibor or Ductibor, to simultaneously reduce a vehicles’ weight while improving safety. Simliarly to elsewhere in the world, the US government has regulations in place to increase the efficiency of road vehicles and reduce their CO2 emissions. The Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards stipulate that car manufacturers have to reduce their average fuel economy from 35.5mpg (US gallons) to 54.5mpg by 2025.
ZumMallen says: “It’s a challenge for everyone, its a very aggressive target, a steep increase to where we are today. We are doing fairly well with fuel economy right now. For our light trucks for example the challenge is to make gains in powertrain, aerodynamics, road load reduction and weight reduction in order to meet the 54.5mpg in 2025.
“But in North America people still love their big vehicles. I don’t know finally where the market will go, but I think people will always want those larger vehicles if they can afford them and they meet their expectations.”
The stamping facility at the Honda plant produces all the parts that a customer can see and touch
The tour is led through racks and racks of panels and structural parts and then into the welding area - which is one of the most automated parts of the plant. Robotic arms dance around the shells of vehicles, joining the parts in a synchronised ballet of movement and sparks. There are almost as many robots as workers in this welding area, 220 versus 250. The welding activity is focused into the general welder, a robotic cell where the sides, roof and floor are positioned using sensors and joined. There are 3,000 welds per vehicle. Despite all the automation, the process is still relegated to metal bashing - after welding workers run their hands over the vehicle bodies to check for defects - these are knocked out using a hammer.
The vehicle bodies are then painted before they enter the rest of the line, where the rest of the car is built up before it enters the quality and testing zone. The entire plant is laid out in a fashion that feels tight and controlled. There is no wasted space, nowhere noticeably still. Lines and conveyor belts pulse around and above, delivering parts and components to the main line. Vehicles are built in blocks of 30 and buffer zones between the areas enable engineers to control the flow on the line, so if there is a delay in one area it can be smoothed out.
What sets the Lincoln plant apart from other car factories is its self-sufficiency, or in executive-speak “vertical integration”. A lot of each vehicle is built on-site - steel blanks in one end, cars out the other. There are components supplied to the factory, the transmission for example, but major components like the instrument panel are assembled on-site. Unusually the plant manufactures V6 engines for the line on-site. The engine manufacturing facility is soon to be expanded, to double the level of automation.
The plant in Lincoln, Alabama will produce around 360,000 vehicles this year
Tomko, from Honda Manufacturing Alabama, says: “There aren’t many factories in the world that have an engine facility and a frame facility on the same site. Even by Honda standard’s we are very vertically-integrated. Stamping, welding, paint, many of the components are done here, but we still balance what is done in house and outside and we do that on a model-by-model basis.”
With foreign companies come foreign ways of working, but from the looks of things Honda, like many others has made itself a sweet home in Alabama and is here to stay.