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It's all coming up right now on Alabama STEM Explorers Hi, my name is Anderson Blunt and welcome back to Alabama.

It's the big stories today.

We are the Mercedes plant.

And this is my friend Brandi who works here.

Yes, hello.

My name is Brandi Burris.

I've been here about five years now here on Mercedes Plant.

We of course, we make the SUV from Mercedes.

We have two different plants in this location.

We have plant to and plant one.

We're currently a plant one where we make our electric vehicle.

And we just started making that electric vehicle around last year.

So did you build this plant around last year too, or was it.

No, this plant was actually the original one and it was built 25 years ago.

Really?

Correct.

So you have worked here all 25 years?

No, I have not.

I have not.

My dad actually did.

My dad worked here 20 years, 20 years before I came.

That's really cool.

Yeah.

So, like, do you only make electric cars or do you make in this plant or do you make like multiple different in this plant?

We only make the electric cars.

Previously we did make the gas powered vehicles and we still make those over in plant, too.

But right now this plant is only designated for the electric vehicles.

And I know like I see like cars coming through here.

So what's going on?

Okay, so this is our end of long process after the car has been built, after we've checked everything on the car, this is where it comes.

And they do the final okay of the car, making sure everything has been fixed and we don't have any open issues going offline.

Once the car is here, it goes to our end of our stations, as you see over there.

And we do other process such as will alignment, our road test, our shower test and just make sure the car is ready to be sold to our customers.

I've seen a lot of machines like moving around and like going around on lines and like all these different machines.

So like, does it take do you guys build the machines here?

Yes.

Most of our maintenance stuff is done here.

We do had the automated robots that you see running with the line right now.

So everything is just in time.

We're building that just in time.

So we have people that are parts off line.

They place them on these carts and as the car is coming down the line, that car follows the car.

That way our team members can just grab the parts of the car, build the car, and nobody's having to wait to get a part or we don't have a bunch of bolt done.

It's sitting on the side of okay.

And I'm noticing like above us the car doors.

Where are they coming down.

That.

Okay, that's a great question.

Great question.

So we actually have multiple different lines and one of the lines we have is door line.

So Dalton, the actual body of the door will come in and then we add the actual door panel, which has all the switches that you would use to let your window up and down or to actually open the door.

We put all that on the car there and then the doors go up into this mezzanine that you see here as the car is completely built.

Like at the end of this line, no doors are on the car.

The doors will drop down and that's when the doors are actually put onto the car.

Oh, are they put on by hand or by machine?

Machine.

But they have a team members down there adjusting, making sure that the feet of the car actually does that.

That's really cool.

And we've already learned a lot of things and I'm really interested about all the machines that they're doing with like them building it themselves and they're moving by themselves.

So I think I'm really excited to learn more about that.

Yeah.

So we can walk around and look at anything you would like to look at.

It's very interesting and we're very excited about the electric car and where the company's moving to and the future of the great.

All right.

So you're asking about the ATV's and the automatic cars we had running around.

So here's an example of our cars virtually, to which each car they've been loaded with, each piece that needs to go to that car.

So as the car goes down the line, the car made for that car will follow it all the way down.

And the team members just take each part of the car and then that's when they start building it.

It's like their own little chauffeur.

Exactly.

That's really cool.

So what are these hanging up here with the chords and everything?

Okay, so as our car comes down the line, we have to wait right here.

We have what we called our test spot for test.

So that's like all of our electrical tests.

But for that to happen, power has to be supplied to the car.

Okay, so these things that drop down, they're basically given power to the car.

So that we can test all of our electrical functions in it.

And you can see an example of somebody performing electrical test.

Do they just travel like around the building and somebody like push a button and say, I need one of these now?

So they just travel on this line because this is where we do our electrical test.

So right here they just rotate this line and once the car hits that station back there, that's when you'll see them drop in to get the power supply.

That's really cool.

Okay, so what are these machines over here that I'm seeing?

Because I see a bunch all the way down the line.

Yeah.

So this particular robot is for our windshield installed.

So our windshield would be placed into the cell right down there, as you can see.

You can also see.

So I'm sitting right here on this level right here.

But as we show goes in, the robot will pick that windshield up and they'll actually place it onto the vehicle because I see some like suction cup looking thing.

Exactly.

So that's like grabbing, that's to grab the glass and so we don't scratch it in it or break it in any way.

The suction cups provide a much safer feel.

Okay.

And then I heard a lot about how you guys are like really good about recycling.

So again, to talk a little bit more about that, yeah.

So we are a big focus on the green planet.

So you will see recycling bins throughout here.

It's a big focus for us to make sure we're putting the right things in the right container.

Oh, that's really cool.

So earlier I was mentioning our end of line process and how we have to come through and do our wheel alignment.

So this is actually our role on the station here in the pit where we do all the hard work.

So far as we come down.

I mean, up here we do a headlight aim, they do the cars a few things at the top of the car, but down here we actually do the adjustment for the axles.

So this is when you're driving and so your car is going to the left or the right and you have to go get an alignment.

This is basically what we're doing before the car is sold to the customer.

Are there multiple of these?

Are there multiple pits around those?

Yes, there are.

We actually have two pits here.

If you were to go to our other plant, there's four pits over there and you can actually run four cars through there and a lot of on top of it here.

We just have two.

And this is the same process for electric.

And like it is, the process is the same for that.

That's really cool.

Yeah.

What happens is the car is not in alignment.

If the car is not in alignment, we send the car off, we then send it to our BBC, which is an analysis center.

They have what they call a hunter in there, and that hunter is able to tell us what on the axle is actually out of spec.

We'll send that back to the supplier.

The supplier will either send us a new axle to get to fix it, or they can come over here and replace the parts and make that so.

What's going on now?

Okay, so right now you'll see that he's making the front end adjustment on the screen.

You'll see where it says tow front, left, front, right, and it'll show in red if we're out of spec.

But you'll see as he's adjusting, it'll slowly move to the green.

Oh so you see that that he right now he's working on the front, right on the screen.

You can see that that values color slowly getting closer to our nominal values.

You see that it just turned green on the right.

He'll lock that in place once he's finished.

And then he moves to the left side and he'll do the exact same.

Are they connected by wires?

No, it's actually a steel arm, so they have what they call total links on the axle.

And so based off where that nut is positioned, that changes the angle and the camber of.

Okay, Anderson, I'm now going to hand you over to one of our other Mercedes team members that's going to show you a few more things about our plant.

Okay.

Let's go.

All right.

Thank you.

I'm Anderson, and this is my new friend, Sean, and we're here at the Mercedes plant.

So what do you do, like around this giant place?

Hey, Anderson.

So I'm responsible for production, actually, for assembly one.

And assembly one is where we build the electric cars here in Mercedes-Benz.

So myself and about 900 of my closest friends every day, our goal is to build cars to the utmost ability to satisfy our customer.

So like, what do we have going on over here?

Yeah.

So this is actually the chassis for the electric car.

So this is what's you could say the bottom of the car is there's essentially four or five major components that we're looking at.

The first one up here at the front is the front axle.

Part of the front axle, for example, is your brakes.

You brake assembly right here.

This is your your rotor and this is your caliper assembly.

And then right behind me, this big black thing that we're looking at right here, that's actually the battery for the car.

It's quite large.

It weighs about 1200 pounds.

Then right behind that is the rear axle.

And actually sitting on top of the rear axle.

Back there is the electric motor itself.

Now, if we have a four wheel drive car, which is right behind us, we actually have a motor sitting right here also for the front axle.

So it's really four or five major components that put together the main drive train for an electric car.

So whenever I think of a factory, I always imagine like a bunch of people that you have, but now you guys do a lot with machines.

So all of this is this all made by a machine?

It's manufactured for the most part by machines, but with a lot of people helping along the way.

Usually machines are good for picking up heavy, big things, doing it the same way every time.

But people are much better at doing small things that require a lot of dexterity or different things from car to car.

So you use a combination of both to put a car together.

And I see that it's moving around this way and going up there.

And so that's where it kind of all starts really coming together.

That's right.

Yep.

So over here, behind us over here is what we call marriage.

So if you think about it, a car has two big halves.

The bottom half that we're looking at right here, and then the top half, which is what most customers always deal with, which is what they sit in, where your seats are and your steering wheel and everything.

When you put the two halves together, we actually call that marriage where we married the two pieces together, hopefully for the life, long life of the vehicle from that point on.

And so are the seats already installed by then or do you have to do it all later?

Good question.

So each each vehicle is built up in a specific sequence.

Engineers take a lot of time to plan that out and use the best process they can.

So it's the most efficient and effective way of doing that for electric car and our architecture of the vehicle, the seats actually come in later after the battery is installed into the vehicle.

So how many engineers do you have working like in this whole factory, within this factory, including the planning engineers?

And we have lots of different kinds of engineers in the plant planning engineers.

We have mechanical engineers, environmental engineers, we have chemical engineers in the paint shop, civil engineers.

So lots of different kinds of engineers.

So everyone needs to know that it doesn't take one person to make a car.

It takes a bunch of people together.

That's right.

Absolutely.

In a few factory machines and quite a few machines.

So this is marriage?

It is, yep.

So there comes the bride and here comes the bride.

And they come together to make basically the whole base of the car.

That's right.

That's right.

Yeah.

So you've got the the underside of the car, which is the battery and the things we looked at over on the chassis.

So the battery in the front axles and our front rear axle on the motor, that's the bottom.

And the top is what you see.

Like I said earlier, this is really what the customer interfaces with over the lifetime of the vehicle.

Notice there's no seats in the car yet, but you can see the dashboard installed, the center console, the center console, the dash is really cool.

So that's called a hyperscreen.

It actually has multiple screens that the the passenger and the driver can interface with.

But these two pieces come together right here.

And this is what basically forms the main structure of the vehicle at this point.

And so I see that there's already seatbelts in it.

Do people have to do that by hand or is that a machine?

No, good question.

So the seatbelts are actually installed by hand.

We use automatic tools to do the tightening, but they're run actually by a person.

So a person picks up a tool, they pull the trigger, and then it runs a very specific torque program to achieve a very specific torque on the seatbelt.

And then we save the results of that torque for the life of the vehicle so that if anything might happen down the road, we actually know the exact torque, what happened when we put that seatbelt into the car.

Okay.

And then I'm also noticing that there's already like windshields or windows installed.

That's right.

So what do you guys have this out of?

How do we make the windshield?

Or like, what are they made out of?

What's the material?

Right.

So the windshield, the liftgate glass, the quarter window that you see.

And actually, if you look up in there, the whole roof is actually made out of glass, very common glass that you would use in traditional automotive manufacturing, all designed to be safe in the event of a crash.

Right.

That's our number one with Mercedes-Benz to make sure that the customer safe and of the cash, even the glass is designed to make sure there's no injury from it.

And do the windows automatically or there's a covering on, is there covering on the windows or are they always open like that?

No.

So and the roof actually has a curtain, we call it, that comes out or comes closed to keep the sunlight out of the car.

It's like a sunroof.

It's like a great big sunroof.

And the actual driver can open and close it or the passenger can open and close it, or you can actually just talk to the car.

You can just verbally say, Hey, Mercedes, please open the sunshade and it will open on its own.

That's really cool.

I love like how the car already looks like it's pretty much came together all the way, but there's still like all the little details and obviously the seats that need to get in.

But from here, there's still so much that's like been done already.

Yep.

At this point it's about 70% complete.

We still have to put the seats in the car.

We start to put the wheels on the car, we start to put the front end on the car and the bumpers.

Those are the big components that are left to go in the car, plus a lot of little stuff, little connections, little hoses.

We have to put the fluids in the car.

A lot of things that the customer never sees, actually.

So what is the engineering behind like all of the vehicle?

Pretty much so, sure.

So when you design a vehicle, the first thing you want to consider is who's the end user, who's going to use the car, what's their purpose going to be?

These vehicles, for example, are large vehicles.

These are large SUV.

And so you think about it, for the most part, probably a family is going to use this vehicle once you understand that, then you need to decide, okay, where's the vehicle going to be driven?

For instance, there's a big difference sometimes in cars that are meant for, say, winter weather versus summer weather.

Or maybe you want the vehicle to be able to handle all of that.

This vehicle is actually designed to go to 138 different countries.

So we sell this car worldwide, 138 different countries.

For the most part, it's going to be families that will be purchasing the vehicle because you can either put five people in the car or seven people in the car.

Once engineer understands that, then they have a design or concept, and then from there that engineer designs the concept, the hands that over to the engineers that actually will design the parts that will come together in a sequence to satisfy that need of what the end customer is actually going to do with the car.

And that takes a period of about five years, usually for vehicle development.

So how do they do this size or like do they do different sizes?

Yeah, absolutely.

So for instance, we actually put different sized batteries in the car, different sized motors, and we actually have two different length of the vehicle in here.

We have one that's like I described can seat for seven people and then one that's a little bit shorter that seats five people.

Okay.

But they're generally the same.

Very similar, though.

So, Anderson, they know what logistics is.

So that's kind of like the business side, I guess, like how it's kind of not exactly.

Okay.

So I actually started here working in logistics and I thought logistics was like the UPS guy bringing me apart.

No, not at all.

Actually, if you think about it, in a car plant, we do three big things here and it's a logistics operation.

And then in an assembly operation, which is what we're looking at right here.

And then the last thing we do is we check in, make sure the car is correct before to sell it to the customer.

But what logistics means an automotive plant is how you actually get the parts to the line before you assemble them.

If you think about it, the car we're looking at right here, there's about 3000 different parts that have to be delivered to this assembly shop to put this car together.

And looking at it, you wouldn't think there's 3000 different parts necessarily, but there are.

And logistics is all about how do you organize that in the most efficient way to bring the parts to the line so that the person putting the part on the car can do so in the most efficient manner?

Automotive manufacturing.

In manufacturing in general, it takes a lot of engineers and a lot of time and allow for thought and then a lot of continuous improvement afterwards to put the vehicle together in the most cost effective and most efficient manner so the customer gets the right product at the right time and of the right quality.

Oh, really?

So like all of this was given or not given, but all of this was made by somebody else that you got it from or do you make it here?

Good question.

So assembly shop is not actually technically manufacturing.

Okay.

An assembly shop is where you literally assemble things together.

Manufacturing on the flip side is a different form of engineering.

Manufacturing is actually where you produce something.

You take a raw good and you turn it into a product, a piece, a component normally is the normal context.

And so in an assembly shop, logistically, we want to bring all the manufacturing components to the right place at the right time so that we can assemble it in the most efficient way.

So, you know, I understand.

I think something might be really cool.

We've talked about the top of the car.

We've talked about the chance here, the bottom part of the car.

Why don't we go take a look real quick where the battery goes in the car?

Yeah, let's hear a little bit more about it.

Okay.

So so, Anderson, check it out.

So this is where the battery comes into the plant.

This is what's going to be the start of the chassis or the bottom of the car right across the way.

You actually see two batteries and this large machine right above it, it's going to pick up that battery and transfer over to where we're standing and set it down on this frame.

And then from there, we'll consider, you know, continue to build the car up from there.

These batteries are actually real.

Right down the street, about 11 miles from here, we have a battery factory that does the assembly of those batteries.

And it's pretty cool.

And I would love to see y'all come back at some point.

You might have found that really interesting.

Inside that battery, as you'll learn more, is kind of like having 12 big or smaller batteries wired in series almost.

You learn more about that when you see it.

But that's that's the basics of a battery.

It's it looks really complicated and it is in a in some regards it's also quite simple.

At the end of the day.

Now, we don't have a lot of batteries here in the plant.

If you look actually, there's only five sitting on the ground right here, the two in the station, and there's three more over there behind you.

We try to minimize how many batteries that we have in the plant.

The batteries are very expensive.

We don't want to damage them.

So the less material that you keep, it's a basic principle logistics.

The less material you keep, the more efficient you are about having to move it around because you might imagine, what if there was like 100 batteries?

They're pretty hard to move a hundred around or to move them in and around each other to find the right one.

So we want to keep the inventory to a minimum.

It's less and it's less cost and it's more efficient for us.

And is there like a way they put in the energy?

Very good question.

So after the battery, is complete, yes, they actually energize the battery and they basically, you could say charge it up or fill it up to a certain amount, about 30% for and then they ship it to us.

So that battery right there is about 30% charged.

Oh, okay.

So they charge it more later.

Right.

So we want to keep it at that level through the through the plant.

And then afterwards, once the vehicle is ready to be sold to the customer, then it'll be charged all the way up.

It's a lot like buying.

It's a lot like buying a combustion engine car.

If you think about it, the vehicle, when it combustion engine car arrives at the dealership, it normally has maybe an eight the per quarter tank of gas, but that's it.

But usually a good dealership.

They all fill up the tank for you before they hand it over to you the first time.

Basically the same thing with Electric Car.

Well, I've learned a lot about cars today and how they're made in everything.

And in cars there's science, technology, engineering and math all put together to make well, this factory and this plant and everything and everyone working in it knows science, technology, engineering and math.

So I feel like we should definitely come back to the battery plant.

You're more than welcome.

We'd love to have you.

I'm a manufacturing engineer here at Johnson Controls, and my day to day activities include finding things to continuously improve, working on different process implementations.

One of the fun things I get to do is actually deal with the capital investments.

So I guess a lot I'm the guy at the plant that gets to deal with the millions of dollars, you know, when it comes to investing in the plant.

So what led me to this job?

Actually, this is a kid, believe it or not, in middle school they introduced this new course and it was either you could do the new technology course and the course had new lights and all these these different new technology in the classroom.

Just it was amazing.

And it was either that or you can do literature.

And so it was a no brainer for me.

So that's what kind of led me to this career in engineering.

My favorite part of this job I'm going to tell you is I get to come in here and I work with different operators that present a problem every day.

And they don't they're not aggravated about it, but they present the problem.

And it gives me a chance to be their superhero for the day.

You know, you fix things.

You you help solve their problems.

You make life easier for them.

So when they clock in to work, they feel good about what they do.

So that's probably my favorite part about working in this job.

You know, believe it or not, being an engineer, science was neat as far as mixing chemicals, but I didn't.

There were certain parts of science I didn't like, but when it came to math, I love math.

And so math was always just my strong point art.

I loved to draw as a kid, and so naturally as an engineer, you know, you get into drawing and stuff, especially when you go to college or you learn about design or some of the cool things I get to work on here at Johnson Controls.

So we have we have a little bit of automation in the plant, so we have some robots and things that we get to work on.

Probably the coolest thing we have in the plant is our rapid seal welder.

It's a ultrasonic welder, so that's new technology for the plant.

That's probably the coolest thing.

I get to work on the parts of STEM that I use here, my job, definitely math.

We do a lot of math and most definitely math.

There's some science, we do a lot of measuring.

So I would say there's the engineering part of it really.

We use it all here.

Believe it or not, there's a little bit of science involved when it comes to plastics and the different parts that we make and how they melt and the temperatures for the technology piece, most definitely.

That's where the rapid comes in.

Ultrasonic welding, brand new technology, kind of state of the art as far as this planet facility is concerned when it comes to melting plastic.

So a very cool process.

So when I tell you this job, you know, believe it or not, we actually use all of the letter of STEM.

So very cool.

Very cool stuff.

Advice I would give to young people today.

I would tell young people to just accept the challenge that life presents.

You know, I was a I was a good student growing up, but I was there were times where I'd be afraid of challenges.

And that's where some of those coaches and different things, they would always challenge me and push me.

So I would just say, be willing to accept the challenge.

We'll see you next time on Alabama STEM Explorers bye!

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Champions of Servant Leadership.