At first, I’m apprehensive about entering the laser chamber. Its 13-kilowatt diodes fire blasts of energy powerful enough to melt metal. At the moment, they are ready to join the roof and wall frame of an Audi A3 sedan. But the engineer at Audi’s plant in Ingolstadt, Germany, insists that I see up close the “invisible” laser-brazed seam about to be made, including a minuscule bend, just five millimeters around, that prevents the car’s body from corroding when exposed to the elements.
The shell of the car sits in the center of the chamber and is surrounded by robotic arms, one of which aims what looks like a soldering iron. The laser brazing process, like much else on the 540,000-square-foot factory floor, is automated and secured behind barriers or within a closed chamber. Later, when I do see people inside the factory, they tend to be pedaling down the long, spotless corridors on red bicycles.
Hubert Hartmann, head of the A3 body shop at Ingolstadt, calls it the most modern factory floor of its kind. “It is like a Swiss watch, with the same level of precision,” he says as machinery whirs nearby with preprogrammed exactness. While most auto plants use robots for welding and other dangerous tasks, Audi marries a high level of automation with a multitude of other advanced manufacturing technologies, including low-power lasers driven by optical sensors; innovative combined bonding and welding, which saves both production time and car weight; and regenerative braking in lift and conveyor systems to reduce energy costs.
Despite relatively high wages, long vacations, and strong labor laws and regulations, Germany remains a global leader in many manufacturing sectors. Last year, automotive and industrial exports helped the country post a record trade surplus of 198.9 billion euros ($269 billion). One reason: automation. Contemporary German auto manufacturing exploits advanced manufacturing technologies to increase productivity and profits. As a result, manufacturing employment has dropped. Between 1970 and 2012, the proportion of German employment in manufacturing fell by half, to around 20 percent (nearly double the U.S. share).
At Audi’s A3 body shop in Ingolstadt, the robots are roughly equal in number to the 800 employees. They do most of the heavy lifting, as well as potentially dangerous spot welding and bonding, and tediously repetitive testing. To Bernd Mlekusch, head of technology development production at Audi, the benefits of automation include much higher productivity and reduced demand for untrained workers. At the same time, workers with more training and greater specialization are increasingly needed, he says. German automotive workers, and German manufacturing workers in general, are already paid significantly more than their American counterparts.
