SÖDERTÄLJE, Sweden—Scania AB, a leading European manufacturer of trucks and buses, is installing remanufactured gearboxes in new vehicles at its flagship assembly plant here.
VÉNISSIEUX, France—Renault Trucks has opened a new Used Parts Factory here with a dedicated disassembly line for its heavy-duty vehicles sold in Europe.
Over the past 120 years, the automotive industry has experienced several transformative paradigm shifts that have dramatically changed the process of mass-producing cars and light trucks.
When a customer learns that his car's engine needs to be replaced, the shop mechanic typically mentions three options, new, rebuilt or remanufactured, with the latter two being much less expensive because they contain new and recycled parts.
Trucks moved roughly 71 percent of the nation's freight by weight in 2016, according to the American Trucking Association. That's 10.55 billion tons of freight or $738.9 billion in gross freight revenue. To move all that stuff around, some 34 million trucks logged more than 450 billion miles.
In the Chicagoland area, the home of ASSEMBLY Magazine for the past 60 years, freight trains are a daily fact of life. It's hard to drive anywhere without encountering at least one long train with numerous cars pulled by powerful locomotives.
Sitting under the hood of every new car—and many older cars made since 1990—is the engine control module (ECM). Often referred to as “the car’s computer,” it usually employs the most powerful and expensive microcontroller in the vehi-cle.
