Transforming an automotive factory entering its seventh decade into a future-proof facility ready for AI-powered autonomous driving comes with natural challenges. Among them: architectural drawings from the 1960s – and the imperial system. “We had to inspect everything and go out with the tape measure,” explains Dan Ford, site director of the Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) site in Halewood, Merseyside, England. “But the dimensions on the drawing were wrong: we hit a drainpipe.”
Apart from that minor obstacle (the weather in Britain and a rainstorm in August caused work to be postponed for 48 hours), JLR's £250 million ($323.4 million) upgrade of the Halewood factory went smoothly. On the River Mersey, 10 miles from Liverpool, Halewood has long been synonymous with the British car industry – and JLR is Britain's largest automotive employer. (The company's controversial Jaguar Type 00 will be built at another factory in Solihull). Opened in 1963 by Ford of Great Britain to build the Anglia (the small family sedan starred as a flying car in the Harry Potter Series), plans to transform the factory began in late 2020. The Ford team ditched the tape measure for a digital twin, scanning 1,000 m² (10,764 sq ft) from floor to ceiling every weekend.
Halewood has now been adapted for cars of the future. A fleet of 750 robots (“our version of the Terracotta Army,” says Ford), laser alignment technology and cloud-based infrastructure join the 3,500 JLR employees on the factory floor, expanded by 32,364 m2 to produce the manufacturer's factory products. next generation vehicles. New calibration systems measure the responsiveness of a vehicle's advanced driver assistance systems, such as its cameras and sensors. Safety levels can be calibrated for future autonomous driving, Ford says.
The first phase in the redevelopment of Halewood was the new body shop, with two floors separated by 2.5 meters of concrete for heavy machinery, capable of producing 500 bodies per day. The new construction line is now in the commissioning phase: pre-production electrified mid-size SUVs will be tested through 2025. Forty new autonomous mobile robots are now helping Halewood employees install high-voltage batteries. Other additions include a £10 million ($12.9 million) automated painted body storage tower, where up to 600 vehicles can be stacked, picked up by cranes for just-in-time customer orders.
Halewood is JLR's first fully electric installation. The UK government's mandate to produce zero-emission vehicles, part of its plan to move to a net-zero economy, came into effect in early 2024: 22 percent of all new car sales must be zero-emission. The law has forced the industry to effectively accelerate production of electric vehicles, effectively banning the sale of new gasoline cars by 2035; the EU has similar regulations. Every JLR luxury brand will have a pure-electric model by 2030, with the Range Rover Electric available for pre-order (the company's only available battery-electric car, the Jaguar I-Pace, launched in 2018, is being discontinued).
