SKOVDE, Sweden--Volvo has revealed that its engine factory here has achieved the feat of going entirely carbon neutral. The announcement represents the first hurdle towards the company’s ambitious plan to make its entire global operations climate neutral by 2025.
MONTGOMERY, AL—Mazda and Toyota have selected Huntsville, AL, as the site of their new joint-venture assembly plant. The $1.6 billion factory will have the capacity to build 300,000 vehicles annually and is expected to create up to 4,000 jobs.
WARREN, MI—FCA US LLC will invest more than $1 billion to modernize its assembly plant here to produce the next-generation Ram Heavy Duty pickup, which will be shifted from Saltillo, Mexico, starting in 2020. The move is expected to create 2,500 jobs.
NEWBERRY, SC—South Carolina and Samsung officials on Friday celebrated the first washing machines made at the company’s first U.S. appliance assembly plant. The event came less than seven months after officials announced plans to locate in Newberry, invest $380 million in a former Caterpillar factory and create 1,000 jobs by 2020.
MARTORELL, Spain—Some 125 automated guided vehicles share the workspace every day with 7,000 employees at SEAT’s assembly plant here. The AGVs transport 23,800 parts daily and cover a distance of 436,000 kilometers every year, equivalent to the distance between Earth and the Moon.
BUFFALO, NY--Tesla Inc. has kicked off production of its long-awaited electricity-producing shingles that Elon Musk says will transform the rooftop solar industry. Manufacturing of the photovoltaic glass tiles began last month at a factory here built with backing from New York State, the company said in an email Tuesday.
TOULOUSE, France--The first structurally complete airframe for the new Airbus BelugaXL has rolled out from its assembly hangar here, the manufacturer said Tuesday. Based on an A330-200F airframe, the planned fleet of five BelugaXLs will provide 30 percent more transport capacity than the Beluga-600XTs they will replace.
YOKOHAMA, Japan--Nissan announced yesterday that the company has sold its 300,000th Nissan LEAF globally since the model first went on sale in 2010. The 100-percent electric LEAF is the world's first mass-produced, and also the world's best-selling, electric car. Nissan launched a fully redesigned version of the LEAF in September 2017.
WASHINGTON--The Bureau of Labor Statistics recently reported that the United States added 196,000 factory jobs in 2017, including 25,000 jobs in December. Scott Paul, president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing, says that factory jobs are growing at a faster rate than jobs in the overall economy.
TOKYO—Kenichi Yamamoto, who led the engineering team that produced a commercially viable rotary engine at the company now known as Mazda Motor Co. and later became its president and chairman, died on Dec. 20. He was 95.