Chongqing- With tens of thousands of parts, a car will be produced after stamping, welding, painting, and final assembly. So, how long does it take to make a car? The answer for Changan Automobile is 18 hours.

Recently, an iChongqing reporter visited Changan Auto Chongqing Liangjiang Factory and was impressed by big data intelligent innovation in Chongqing's manufacturing industry.

Making a car in 18 hours

In the stamping workshop, the reporter noticed that automobile body sheets were neatly stacked and barely found a worker. "Soon, these sheets will be stamped on the production line, becoming the body shell of a car," said the person in charge of the workshop.

Five of China's most advanced high-speed automatic stamping machines run on the stamping line 15 times per minute. 

After stamping, the parts are transported to the welding workshop. This workshop looks like a "mechanical forest." With hundreds of robotic arms, some of which are for spot welding and arc welding, while others are for grabbing, testing, or lettering.

The person in charge added that 532 robots here control the welding accuracy within 1.5 mm. The stamping line can produce a body part in a few seconds, and it only takes 18 hours to complete the entire process.

In the past, a production line required 200 workers to produce only one model. The production line will be scrapped as soon as the model is halted, resulting in huge losses. But now, when the model is upgraded, it only needs to make some modifications to the data of the production line, and it can continue to be used.

An intelligent transformation

Intelligent applications can be seen almost everywhere in the assembly workshop. For example, cameras can identify more than 20 car tires based on their tread patterns in the tire installation process and send them to different work areas.

"With intelligent technology and big data analysis, we can improve both production efficiency and factory profitability," said the person in charge of Changan Auto Chongqing Liangjiang Factory.

Changan Auto Chongqing Liangjiang Factory is the epitome of the development of intelligent manufacturing in Chongqing. In recent years, Chongqing has promoted smart manufacturing based on intelligent transformation.

The city has implemented 4,800 intelligent transformation projects, built 734 digital workshops and 127 smart factories, and improved the production efficiency of demonstration projects to 58.9%.

The layout of digital infrastructure also accelerated. Chongqing is one of the first batch pilot cities for 5G large-scale networking, with the number of 5G base stations per 10,000 people ranking first in western China.

Chongqing launched the Xinghuo Blockchain Infrastructure and Facility (Xinghuo BIF) (Chongqing) this July and was also approved to build the Chengdu-Chongqing hub in the national computing hubs.

Meanwhile, the national-level industrial Internet identification and resolution node (Chongqing) has been connected to 9 provinces and 2,802 enterprise nodes, driving the identification registrations to 12.5 billion and 7.6 billion in identification resolution.

(Yang Qinmei, as an intern, also contributed to this report.)