Renault taps metaverse tech in race to build cars quicker

Charvet’s focus is getting group KPIs (key performance indicators) heading in the right direction. These include production volume, number of vehicles in repair, energy consumption and the number of cars that broke down the day before (for cars up to three months old).

The targets are tough. Renault wants to cut production costs for electric vehicles in half in the five years between 2023 and 2027, and by 30% for combustion-engined cars. It wants to reduce energy consumption by 40% and improve building time per car to 10 hours on average. 

In Palencia, Spain – one of the company’s ‘reference’ plants for its all-round improvements – the build time  per car is currently 11.8 hours.

Renault, along with all other European volume brands, is sprinting to stay ahead of the Chinese threat. “We have to have acknowledge they go faster for EVs,” said Charvet.

One reason is their faster development time, something Renault is looking to learn from. “They were first to develop product and process at the same time,” said Charvet. That means they are already prepping for the production before they finish development of the car, another practice that Renault is keen to replicate. “They do not wait to have final tooling to make final validation of the products. That helps to save at least one year.”

Renault compressing its own development times, promising two years for next year’s Twingo against three years for the Renault 5 and four years for the Megane E-Tech.

Reducing the number of parts in a model is another big push. The Twingo's part count is nearly 40% lower than that of the Megane, at 650 parts versus 1080. Being smaller helps.

Having fewer parts to fit directly speeds up production and is aimed the labour-intensive elements, including the interior, electronic system and the drivetrain rather than body and chassis, where robots handle much of the labour. “It’s more for final line, because here we have many workers,” said Charvet.

Renault knows this in much greater detail thanks to all the data harvested in a project that was started around eight years ago, then dubbed Industry 4.0. 

To start with, it was a “nightmare”,  said Eric Marchiol, head of digital transformation, manufacturing and supply chain for the Renault Group. They had to force machinery suppliers to open up their software in order gather and transmit data they produced. “We hacked the robots,” said Marchiol.

They standardised the data and created the ‘digital twin’ data visualisation model. “It was complete game -changer,” said Marchiol.

All that data is proving irresistible to software engineers, who  previously would have given an old-fashioned industry like automotive a swerve. 

Improvements are already visible. Renault claims a 26% reduction in energy use between 2021 to 2024. Meanwhile, quality at the Palencia plant has improved twofold in two years, we were told.

Right now, Renault tracks a new car from the order through production to delivery. The company wants keep tracking it after the customer takes over to keep monitoring for quality. Currently, the tracking stops on handover, when a new mode is activated that ceases data transfer according to privacy laws unless the customer opts in. “We want to do a metaverse of the car itself,” said Lavernos.

Charvet should be happy that such a bold long-term project is bearing fruit in a seemingly spectacular way. But there’s a wrinkle. “It's clear on an EV when you buy the battery cells the weight of final assembly is reduced nearly by half,” he said. “The battery cost is close to the car cost.”

In other words, Renault’s success in reducing production cost accounts for a much smaller proportion of the final price of an EV, because the battery costs are outside of Renault’s control, given its decision not to develop cells internally. 

For a company that now has almost complete visibility across every car it makes, it’s frustrating for the firm not to be able peer into the workings of its biggest suppliers. In its new role of digital control freak, that could be what finally persuades Renault to spend the big bucks in cell manufacturing.