EV Battery Installation Tooling Validation & Process Feasibility in VR

In this video, we demonstrate the value of Virtual Assembly Validation reviews to address potential Human-Centric Process challenges for new products. We evaluate hypothetical tooling to assist with EV battery module loading to a “rolling chassis” through an automotive assembly plant. By experiencing tooling interactions when performing the placement of the battery, we can identify any costly oversights in the engineering design of proposed tooling and assembly line hardware, long before committing significant resources to what could be a bad idea.

Internal combustion engines (ICE) products are being displaced by Electric Vehicles. Despite nearly a century of experience mass producing cars, automotive OEMs today are still in the first “generation” of planning assembly lines for Electric Vehicles—experience assembling ICE far outstrips our collective experience with electric vehicles. Perhaps in a few years, as OEMs launch and update their Electric Vehicles, they will learn valuable lessons in plant layout and planning for general assembly and final trim of EV. But which OEM can afford to wait to learn those lessons while risking cost overruns, delayed launches, reduced quality, diminished reputation, and injured team members? Instead, automotive OEMs can accelerate some of that learning by conducting Virtual Reality powered reviews of the Human-Centric Assembly processes, namely those performed by humans rather than robots or automation.

In this review, we can recognize in just a few minutes what normally takes several weeks or months to realize in reality-that the proposed tooling is not comfortable or safe to operate in a production environment. We can use VR to experience the assembly process comfortably and safely, all without making anyone wait until the product is available physically or the person is present at the plant. By providing the virtual Pilot Assembly Plant with the intended product data and proposed tooling, we effectively travel in time and space to the future assembly plant after construction. We can evaluate if the product fits the proposed process and if people will be productive in that environment, in plenty of time to do something about any issues that emerge during the review.