HIROSHIMA, Japan—Mazda Motor Corp. has unveiled a strategic initiative to assemble electric vehicles. It views the next five years as the "dawn of electrification.” Under a “2030 management policy,” the automaker claims that it will “flexibly respond to diversifying customer needs and environmental regulations.”

“As Mazda navigates its way through a transition to electrification, we are adopting mixed-line production that enables us to flexibly and efficiently keep up with diversifying customer needs and changing products,” says Taketo Hironaka, managing executive officer in charge of production engineering, global quality, carbon neutrality and cost innovation.

“To cope with an increase of components and parts, we have decided to introduce nonfixed production equipment to further enhance the production line’s flexibility and evolve to a Monozukuri Innovation 2.0 mixed-production line,” explains Hironaka.

“To illustrate, changing the subassembly line from [fixed conveyors to flexible automated guided vehicles] gets rid of restrictions on assembly orientation to accommodate diverse power trains with different workloads,” Hironaka points out. “The updated subassembly line enables multi-access, with no space and work time restrictions. In addition, we can change the number of processes as we like by changing the number of AGVs, enabling us to assemble a variety of power trains....

“For mounting power trains to the body in the main line, programmable AGVs have been introduced for automated mounting on vehicle bodies…,” adds Hironaka. “These production technologies have been introduced to the Hofu No. 2 Plant and will be deployed to the Hiroshima Plant…as electrification progresses, so that we can support our multi solution strategy in a global scale.