News of Daimler and Renault-Nissan Alliance building a joint plant in Mexico to produce premium small car may signal a trend in the future when car companies join forces to build flexible plants capable of producing multiple models for more than one company.
Both Daimler and Renault-Nissan would share development costs and work toward production of Infiniti cars in 2017 and Mercedes-Benz cars a year later.
The Mexican plant will initially employ 3,600 workers and will have a production capacity of 230,000 cars per year.
There are many examples of carmakers sharing technologies and know-how but this is the first time that two companies are actually sharing a production plant.
Daimler already shares technology with Aston Martin while the three German companies share with American and Japanese companies aluminum and carbon-fiber technologies.
Ford is renowned for offering some safety-related technology patent-free to other companies.
Sharing a full production plant means there are no more industrial secrets to hide or technologies to protect.
Both companies would have to share all aspects of production but will also share the costs which would more than compensate for sharing production methods.
In the past, all factories were out of bounds for press photographers. Journalists’ cameras were confiscated before plant visits.
Companies feared their cherished technologies and production techniques would leak to rivals. Those days are gone.
Now manufacturers rely more on suppliers to provide modules of integrated systems that make final assembly easier and more cost effective and may also protect details of production technologies.
It is also noted that the Mexican joint plant would focus on premium small vehicles only, a segment that does not need pioneering or expensive technologies.
Both companies would have been aware of each other’s production techniques and would be happy to share them in that segment. Maybe in the future car companies would be pushed to more cooperation with the incentive of saving half the costs of new plants.
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*Adel Murad is a senior motoring and business journalist, based in London.
Email: [email protected]
