How Arrival is shaking up factory production

A skateboard-style chassis is formed of extruded aluminium members, then composite body panels are hung on alloy extrusions joined by cast nodes.

The van’s front end is cleverly engineered, too, as a single large precision-formed injection moulding. A mould for this module is pricey, at around £1 million, but it’s common to all versions of the van, so economies of scale apply.

The body panels are formed from thermoset plastic that starts life as a roll of woven material supplied from a factory in Blackburn.

Each panel is built up typically from four material layers, called plies, cut to shape by computer-controlled machines that devise the best combination to reduce waste.

Unlike in a typical composite factory, where workers handle and position the plies into a single part, here robots do the job, using unique handling tools, equipped with hooks and developed by Arrival itself.

The next stage is also robot-controlled: the part is delivered to the heat-press by a Wemo, although an operator keeps an eye on the process.

Soft tools are used on the heat press; these have a shorter life than steel tools but save tens of thousands compared with steel tooling.

To form a panel, the thermoset material is heated to 200deg C for 1min 30sec to ensure that all the thermoset material has melted to the correct shape.

The thermoset material is pre-coloured, so each panel exits the forming tool in its final colour, thus requiring no paint.

This whole panel forming- process is timed to 22min – the ‘tact’ or cycle time that defines how long each operation should take, and the same time is used in the final assembly hall. In volume-production terms, that’s an age for a process that’s usually planned around one minute, but it’s integral to the microfactory concept.

Sets of body panels are then transported by Wemos to the adjacent Number Two Plant for final assembly.

The heart of the assembly plant are five cells of Kuka robots, each cell equipped with around six arms and timed to that 22min tact. These cells are fed with parts by the fleet of Wemos, and co- ordinating these logistics will be the secret to the efficient operation of Bicester.

In charge of robotics is ex- Airbus boffin Giuseppe Napo Montano, whose 50-strong team designed the Wemos from scratch in three years and was busy programming the production sequence when we visited.

“The Wemos are completely configurable, can talk to each other and operate autonomously,” he said.

Three Wemos are needed to support the weight of the van’s platform, which is fitted out with its battery pack, motor and ancilliaries at Cell One; before moving 22min later to Cell Two, where the extruded body ‘hoops’ are fitted; then onto Cell Three, where the cab is constructed from multiple panels and the front module bolted on; and then to further Cells for installation of the interior and load-bay fittings to the customer’s specification.

No vehicles were running down the line during our visit, so we can’t judge the final quality of the vans, but the pre-production examples made at Arrival’s pilot plant in Banbury look well finished.

The race is now on to get production going in time for UPS to start electric delivery of Christmas parcels around London and the south-east of England.

It will be not just a Christmas present for customers but also ground-breaking for Arrival.

Where did the idea come from?

The microfactory concept was first proposed in 1998 by Cardiff Business School academics Peter Wells and Paul Nieuwenhuis.

They shook up car-making by replacing a large-output, sprawling factory with a network of low-volume plants. Instead of a high- investment, metal-bashing press plant, a paint shop and a complex production line, their vision was of low-investment, flexible production equipment responsive to changing market conditions.

“You can build a microfactory network bit by bit, which from a strategic point of view is important, because you expand your production to a growing market by replicating each microfactory locally, rather than building a huge factory and then forcing cars into the retail network,” Wells told Autocar.

They studied low-volume firms like Lotus (which had recently launched the revolutionary extruded-alloy, composite- bodied Elise), Ferrari and electric-car pioneer Think.

The conclusion was to size a microfactory around annual production of 5000. Thus supplying a market like the UK, typically served by a large plant making 300,000 cars per year, would require 60 microfactories, each near a major population centre.