When you arrive at the VinFast factory in Hai Phong, the first thing you notice is the sheer scale of the property. To call it a factory is a bit of an understatement. It’s much more like a small town with factory buildings the size of city blocks. Built on a 900-acre site, the factory can today produce up to 250,000 vehicles a year, and VinFast is working to expand even further.
Disclaimer: VinFast paid for travel and accommodation for the author to attend this event.
Press Store
Automotive production at the VinFast factory in Hai Phong, Vietnam begins in a vast press room. Here, rolls of raw aluminum and steel are cut into semi-finished products and then pressed with a series of dies into body panels for VinFast vehicles. Today, VinFast produces internal combustion vehicles with a clear trajectory towards an all-electric future that will cease production of all combustion vehicles on August 31, 2022. It currently offers three fully electric vehicles starting with the e34 we saw. wandering the streets of Hanoi.
The press shop’s primary operating space was on the second floor, which housed the massive Schuler press. These oversized machines operate essentially autonomously, seamlessly transporting parts throughout the manufacturing process. Die sets work like cookie cutters, with the top and bottom of the die pressed against a piece of sheet metal to press into the desired shape. Watch the video above for a quick look at the Schuler press in action. The orange arms you see dancing in and out of the process use suction cups to grab metal parts and move them from one press section to another. It is a delicate dance with little room for error.
A pair of dies punch out doors, hoods, trunk lids, and more, and can be swapped to make different vehicle parts. The dies used in the press shop weigh tens of tons, each requiring overhead cranes to move them in and out as the machines are converted to a new product. Rows and rows of dies used to make the various panels are stored on the first floor of the press shop, lined up like terracotta soldiers waiting to be called into action.
Completed body panels shoot off the Schuler press and are quickly containerized for shipping to the body shop. Image credit: Kyle Field
After knocking out a line of workers, they visually inspected the panels before placing them on waiting racks. Occasionally one of the panels was pulled out of the mix for closer inspection on a stand specific to each component. The operation was massive but seemed to require very few people, with perhaps a dozen people manning the entire press operation during our visit.
Rows of identically molded body panels await in a warehouse rack for storage or assembly in the body shop. Image credit: Kyle Field, CleanTechnica
The Body Shop
From the press shop, the body panels were transported to the body shop, where armies of ABB robots equipped with spot welders, suction cups and more, supported by a number of VinFast workers, welded the panels together into the body in white. weld at once. Vehicle bodies require an average of more than 6,000 welds, making the body shop the manufacturing equivalent of the Fourth of July, with sparks regularly shooting in all directions.
The scale of the Body Shop was hard to capture in every single image, so here’s a video captured from our first drive through the factory to give you an idea of the scale:
Each flash of sparks represents one of the thousands of spot welds required to assemble the car’s body. Some welds were quick and uneventful, others shot sparks 20 feet into the air. VinFast’s Body Shop uses a very similar process to what we saw at Tesla’s Body Shop in Fremont, California when we visited in 2019. As the process progresses, what was just a few minutes before a pile of sheet metal emerges as a fully assembled vehicle body , raw sheet metal glistening in the factory light.
The VinFast body shop is highly automated, ABB robots move vehicle body parts into place, weld them multiple times at each station and then move them to the next step of the process. Tesla’s factory in Fremont, California was dark and gloomy compared to the bright and spacious VinFast Body Shop, although that was 3 years ago and Tesla has since integrated castings into its vehicle bodies.
General assembly of the vehicle
After the Body Shop, they will run the body in a white paint shop. We didn’t get to tour the VinFast paint shop, but we know it’s a spray process. In the paint shop, paint is sprayed onto the metal bodies and they emerge in whatever color is needed for the finished vehicle.
This is where the real magic of car manufacturing takes place. This is what most people think of when they think of car factories. It’s a Henry Ford-style production line where a different part of the vehicle is bolted on at each step, with the bodywork in progress moving down the line one step at a time. It is very similar today, where the bodies are equipped with everything that makes them a real vehicle. The carpet is applied to the interior of the vehicle. The seats are bolted on, the dashboard is installed, and all the electronics are wired.
Marriage. Image credit: Kyle Field, CleanTechnica
One significant difference with electric vehicles is that the electric motors and batteries are usually installed on the undercarriage and joined to the top of the vehicle in a process called marriage. I’m not here to say who’s on top in your marriage, but in the automotive industry, it’s always the body.
From there, wheels are bolted on, windows fitted and doors tuned before the finished vehicle moves down the line to a quality control station to ensure everything is working properly and the vehicle maintains its watertight seal. Although we saw the VinFast assembly line, we didn’t see how it worked because it was lunch time and all the workers were on break. That’s life.
Components ready for assembly with vehicles moving along the production line on an overhead conveyor. Image credit: Kyle Field, CleanTechnica
The current production line mainly produces internal combustion vehicles, and VinFast plans to stop production of all gasoline vehicles at the end of August this year. For VinFast, this will be a tough conversion to electric vehicles and demonstrates their belief in the electric vehicle space and the future they believe is fully electric. We’re all about zero-emission vehicles of any type, and we couldn’t be more excited about VinFast’s decision to accelerate the adoption of battery electric vehicles and scooters in Vietnam and around the world.
Battery factory
The core of every electric car is the battery, and VinFast showed us its production line dedicated to their assembly. The current battery factory takes pallets of Samsung SDI 21700 external battery cells with a capacity of 4,800 mAh and assembles them first into modules and then into packs. These packs are then fully tested before being pushed out the door and ready for installation in an electric vehicle.
The battery modules are assembled at the VinFast factory in Hai Phong, Vietnam. Image credit: Kyle Field, CleanTechnica
As it stands today, the battery factory is only a fraction of what is to come. VinFast is currently building its own lithium-ion battery manufacturing facility with the help of a number of manufacturing partners. Construction on the new factory in Ha Tinh, Vietnam began in December and is on track to be operational within the next 2 to 3 months, according to a company representative we spoke to. The new factory will initially have a production capacity of 100,000 packs per year with a plan to gradually increase to 1,000,000 packs per year.
The battery modules are checked before being sealed into the finished package. Image credit: Kyle Field, CleanTechnica
Building the battery cells in a new factory 190 miles away will streamline the current process and should help lower battery costs for VinFast. It also transfers control of the most critical components of electric vehicles to their wheelhouse. If successful, in-house battery production could be a key differentiator from the competition. The early leaders in electric vehicles started by sourcing cells from outside suppliers and inevitably either brought in their own cell manufacturing or formed joint ventures with battery cell suppliers.
Overall
VinFast is a new player in the electric vehicle space, and while it’s hard to see what they’re doing from a simple press release or vehicle reveal, seeing really is believing. From what we saw of parent company VinGroup and at the VinFast factory in Hai Phong during our visit, VinFast is making every effort to realize its vision of an all-electric future.
From fleets of all-electric scooters (more on that in the next update) to rapid conversion to 100% electric vehicle production on the automotive side in a matter of weeks, VinFast leverages the entire VinGroup ecosystem to accelerate the transition to all-electric vehicles. as fast as humanly possible.
Disrupting entrenched industries is hard. This is doubly true when the disruption is caused by a startup from a country not known for manufacturing cars, but VinFast keeps moving forward. They transformed this 900-acre plot of land in Hai Phong from a muddy lot into a factory churning out vehicles and scooters in just 21 months, and are attempting a similar feat at a new factory in North Carolina in the eastern United States. It’s time to go. This is where it gets difficult.
Everyone we spoke to at VinFast greeted the challenge with a smile and faced it with believable confidence in their voice. Having seen what they have already accomplished in Vietnam, we will eagerly follow them and cheer them on every step of the way. We believe the future is electric and the future is now. Thank you to all the entrepreneurs, visionaries, companies and individuals working to make their unique visions for a better future a reality.
VinFast VF 8. Image credit: Kyle Field, CleanTechnica
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