Nissan SUVs near the end of the assembly line.Petrina Gentile/The Globe and Mail
Twenty-five years after Nissan introduced its first vehicle to the United States in 1958, the Japanese auto maker opened its first plant south of the border in 1983. After 41 years of operation, the 15 millionth car ceremoniously rolled off a line at that plant in Smyrna, Tenn., earlier this year.
Today, a Nissan or Infiniti vehicle is produced roughly every 30 seconds at Nissan’s largest plant in North America, just outside Nashville. If you drive a Rogue, Pathfinder, Murano or Infiniti QX60 in Canada, chances are it came from this plant. Even Nissan’s first electric vehicle, the Leaf, is built in Smyrna.
But to stay competitive, Nissan says it has strived continuously to improve quality and efficiency, investing more than $8-billion in the plant since 1983.
Now, as the plant gears up for more EV production by the end of the decade, Nissan says it’s incorporating artificial intelligence and more automation to improve quality and reduce production time. It’s also changing work processes to lower employee strain when performing ergonomically challenging jobs.
Some of the manufacturing efficiencies will come from the EVs themselves, which have fewer parts than conventional cars.
“Reduced parts diversity is key to the way that we are going to move forward,” said David Johnson, the regional senior vice-president of manufacturing, supply chain management and purchasing for Nissan Americas. “Right now, it takes anywhere from 1,800 to 2,000 assembled parts to make a car inside of our plants. The total car has about 30,000 parts individually. The less parts we have to assemble, the more common those parts are, and the more we automate, the less time it takes [to build], which leads to tremendous efficiency.”
With fewer moving parts and no need for an engine, exhaust system or alternators in an EV, the assembly process will be shortened and simplified.
To ensure quality, the plant uses machine learning to analyze data versus the old inspection process with employees on the floor doing hands-on inspections. In recent years, the plant has incorporated machine learning into its quality-inspection process, with data analysis supplementing the work of employees on the floor.
“We have over 30,000 connected devices that are streaming terabytes of data that is being analyzed by machine learning, deep learning and optical inspection to ensure we have quality,” said Johnson.
Located on 884 acres of land, the Smyrna plant is like a small city; 113 football fields can fit inside the six-million-square-foot facility. On site, it has everything from a medical clinic to a pharmacy to a fitness centre complete with a driving range, softball field and basketball courts. It also has its own in-house fire crew.
There are five vehicles built on two lines at the facility – the all-new Nissan Murano, Nissan Pathfinder and Infiniti QX60 are on one line; a gas-powered Nissan Rogue and an all-electric Nissan Leaf are built on the other line. More than 7,000 people work on the two lines; each line operates two shifts, day and night. The vehicles are exported to more than 60 markets globally, including Canada, Abu Dhabi, South Korea, Oman and Zimbabwe.
Touring the plant and watching the vehicle-making process is impressive, especially when unfinished vehicle bodies move along the overhead conveyor, a massive system that transports the vehicles throughout the plant on nearly 60 kilometres of track.
Every vehicle begins in “stamping,” where 20-tonne rolls of steel are pressed flat into sheets and then made into parts such as doors, roofs, floors and hoods.
Nissan's Smyrna, Tenn. assembly plant produces a vehicle roughly every 30 seconds.Petrina Gentile/The Globe and Mail
In body assembly, the metal parts are welded together to form the vehicle’s body. More than 1,200 robots do 95 per cent of the welding – the equivalent of about 3,000 welds per vehicle, Johnson said. The robots can detect different body and floor styles to ensure they match – so an Infiniti QX60 floor doesn’t get attached to a Nissan Pathfinder body, for instance.
The vehicle bodies then travel to the paint shop. That’s where AI is used to improve and quicken the quality-control process, Johnson said. Algorithms analyze about 15,000 images taken of each vehicle, searching for defects and sending that information in real time to technicians, so they can spend less time looking for defects and more time fixing them, he said.
The painted vehicles then move to the final assembly area. In the chassis section, engines and transmissions are hydraulically lifted into the bottom of the vehicle body. The engines are produced at Nissan’s nearby powertrain plant in Decherd, Tenn., about 90 minutes south of Nashville, which builds 1.4 million engines and electric motors a year.
Many of the more than 7,000 employees at Smyrna are cross-trained to do four different jobs within an eight-hour shift. Switching jobs allows employees to work different muscle groups, lessening repetitive strains, explained a video that was played before the tour. It can also help reduce stress and boredom while increasing focus.
Employees have free access to certified athletic trainers who develop action plans to treat muscle aches and pains before they become serious.
Looking ahead, Johnson said he hopes to automate some of the more ergonomically challenging jobs where, for example, the full chassis of the vehicle is lifted up and secured. Instead of being done manually with people working overhead, he’d like to see the process become automated, with employees supervising the work or moved to another area. By the end of the year, Nissan Motor Co. will cut 500 salaried jobs in the U.S. – part of 9,000 jobs cut globally. But Johnson doesn’t anticipate any job losses on the shop floor.
In the final product-quality-assurance area, robots work with technicians to calibrate and test various components, including the advanced driver-assistance systems. The vehicles are also tested for squeaks, rattles and handling issues on Nissan’s outdoor test track, where they are put through their paces on different road surfaces and driven up to 120 kilometres an hour to test the brakes.
Throughout the plant, autonomous carts can be seen delivering parts to different production lines. The plant is also testing autonomous forklift trucks to enhance safety and improve efficiency, Johnson said.
Nissan has announced plans to reduce its carbon emissions by 50 per cent at its three U.S. plants by 2050. A big part of its strategy is to reduce the amount of energy needed to produce a specific product – its energy intensity, the intro video explained.
Currently, Smyrna recycles 95 per cent of all the waste generated on site. Every day, the plant recycles more than 15,000 pounds of aluminum – enough to make nearly half a million drink cans – and more than 385,000 pounds of steel.
Even though the plant was founded in an era of muscle cars, Nissan’s biggest U.S. manufacturing facility is looking toward an electrified future.
The writer was a guest of the auto maker. Content was not subject to approval.