Interest in the Kia brand and its highly attractive cars and CUVs is at record highs, and with that in mind, the History Channel show “odern Marvels” decided to visit the plant and a Kia Sorento CUV get built from start to finish; here is what they saw.
Each of the Kia vehicles takes a little over 23 hours to complete, and each one starts life as a 44,000 lb coil of galvanized steel which is passed through an enormous machine which cuts the unrolled coil to size before sending those pieces into the stamping press. In less than an hour, those pieces are transformed into a stack of auto body parts.
The next stop is the welding shop where the robot is king; there are 242 robots as compared to 62 human workers. The 2000 weld performed on each vehicle would take a full day for humans to complete, with that same task finished in less than 90 minutes by the robots.
From there, the floor of the car is sent to the body build line where, once again, it gets the robot treatment, the most important part of which is the roof assembly. Each roof has to be installed and completed in 60 seconds, an impossible task for human hands.
A mere two hours after the unwrapping of the coil, the car frame enters the paint shop where, surprisingly, it will spend almost 30% of its total production time. The paint shop is as sterile as most health care facilities as a single speck of dust could ruin the entire painting process; that process begins with a painstaking pre-wash and chemical dip, and then the frame is dipped in an 86,000 gallon tub of electrically charged paint, a 6 minute process that renders the car virtually rustproof.
The last stop is the paint booth where the cars receive their final coloring, with ID tracking on each unit telling the robots exactly which color that should be.
The last stop before the road is general assembly where the vehicle gets outfitted with electronics, wiring, chassis model, and all the interior pieces and wheels, before taking a shower to test for water tightness. Each car then get a ride on the test track to make sure that everything is working as it should be.
It’s hard to believe that each Kia Sorento CUV can go from a coil of steel to a finished product in just 23 hours, but that’s exactly what happens thanks to a perfect combination of robot precision and human ingenuity.
www.lifetimekia.com
