Page 58 - Australasian Paint & Panel Magazine Sep-Oct 2018

OEM FOCUS
MAN AND MACHINE
Sam Street visited the capital of Audi, the Ingolstadt facotry.
INGOLSTADT IS THE capital of German luxury car maker Audi. I use the term advisedly because the factory at Audi is literally the size of a small country at 2.8 million square metres – that small country is Monaco to be precise.
It has its own train line and bus service to move cars and the 44,000 employees around. Hell, it’s even got its own cinema! Pretty much everyone who lives in Ingolstadt works for Audi in some capacity.
The factory builds 2,400 cars a day – it builds more cars in two days than sister company Lamborghini builds in a year. The majority of cars, 70 per cent, chuff off by train but 11 per cent are picked up by owners for a variety of reasons. Firstly it’s cheaper, but also they get a free tour of the factory and a number of other benefits including a visit to the Audi museum on site which I was gutted I didn’t have time for.
Now I’m sure many of you reading this have been to a car factory and seen the assembly process. So have I – Ford’s Dagenham plant back in 1995. And yes, there were quite a few robots but nothing like the Terminatoresque number in the body assembly factory
where the people are only there to service the robots. There are 806 robots and 800 employees. Only seven per cent of the work is carried out by humans here, and I found it pretty creepy. The car bodies silently make their way up, down and around the factory to receive their armour. The noise is made by the whirr of the robots moving and the hiss, futt of all the welding.
You certainly need a robot to do the work. There are 4,863 spot welds on the A3 while the Q5 has over 5,000. The Audi folk are proud that these bodies have gap tolerances of just 0.05mm.
The morning I visited, the robots had finished 339 bodies and it takes around 4.5 hours for complete body construction and, as robots don’t get tired, they go at it 22.5 hours of the day. Once a month they get a rest while the hall is cleaned and robot maintenance is carried out. You’d want to look after them too, as a basic robot costs around 30,000 euros (approximately $47,000AUD) and there aren’t many basic robots there.
Audi museum.
58 PAINT&PANEL September / October 2018
www.paintandpanel.com.au