Latest news with #Telemetry
Business Wire
3 days ago
- Business
- Business Wire
Grafana Labs Launches Public Preview of AI Assistant for Observability and Monitoring
NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Grafana Labs, the open observability cloud, today announced the public preview of Grafana Assistant, an AI-powered observability tool that allows users to interact with logs, metrics, and traces using natural language. Now available to all Grafana Cloud users, Grafana Assistant helps accelerate root cause analysis, automate query creation, and make monitoring workflows more accessible to developers, SREs, and IT teams at every skill level. "Grafana Assistant has transformed how we tackle observability data, acting like a seasoned expert woven into the interface." As AI transforms how teams build and operate software, observability tools must evolve to match the speed, scale, and complexity of modern systems. This is backed by the 2025 Observability Survey from Grafana Labs, which found that complexity and signal-to-noise ratio are the two biggest challenges with observability. Grafana Assistant was purpose-built to meet this demand. It bridges the gap between traditional observability tools and the new demands of today by making observability data more accessible, actionable, and conversational. 'There's no doubt that AI is accelerating the pace of innovation. As more organizations adopt a software-driven mindset, they're using AI to rewire how they operate, from revenue and operations to reliability and customer experience,' said Tom Wilkie, Grafana Labs CTO. 'That's why we built Grafana Assistant: a context-aware AI agent that helps teams move from signal to action faster, right inside the tools they already use. Tools like this – along with other AI-powered capabilities in our open observability cloud, like Asserts knowledge graph and Adaptive Telemetry – are helping companies navigate growing digital complexity and act with greater clarity and speed.' Grafana Assistant introduces a context-aware AI agent directly into the Grafana UI, enabling real-time collaboration, investigation, and dashboard creation – all through natural language. Instead of writing complex queries or jumping between tools, users can simply ask questions to: Understand their observability data and environment with in-context guidance and best practices drawn from Grafana's extensive documentation, blog content, and community knowledge. Follow logical paths of inquiry during incidents, supported by AI trained on real-world SRE workflows. Users can even run multiple multi-step investigations in parallel. Create and modify dashboards and panels using natural language, speeding up common tasks and reducing friction. Navigate across Grafana apps and views effortlessly, with the Assistant understanding Grafana URLs and workflows, from querying metrics, logs, traces, and profiles to declaring incidents, creating SLOs, or setting up alerts. This means users don't need to be observability experts to troubleshoot faster, collaborate more effectively, and stay in control of even the most dynamic, AI-driven systems. It's already making an impact with early adopters: "Grafana Assistant has transformed how we tackle observability data, acting like a seasoned expert woven into the interface,' said Mikhail Volkov, Founder and CEO of Volkov Labs. 'It empowers non-technical users, who might find Grafana's technical complexities daunting, to swiftly investigate incidents, craft intuitive dashboards, and explore Grafana Cloud with remarkable ease and confidence." Grafana Assistant is available now in public preview in Grafana Cloud. About Grafana Labs Grafana Labs is the open observability cloud helping organizations understand their systems at scale and turn data into action. With more than 25 million users and over 5,000 customers, including Bloomberg, Citigroup, Dell Technologies, Salesforce, and TomTom, Grafana Labs offers a composable observability stack built around Grafana, the world's most popular open source technology for dashboards and visualization; scalable metrics (Grafana Mimir), logs (Grafana Loki), and traces (Grafana Tempo); and a rich ecosystem of data source plugins. Grafana Cloud, the company's fully managed observability offering, includes turnkey solutions for Kubernetes and infrastructure monitoring, application observability, incident response, load testing, and more. Grafana Labs is backed by leading investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Lead Edge Capital, GIC, Sequoia Capital, Coatue, J.P. Morgan, and CapitalG. Follow Grafana Labs on LinkedIn and Twitter or visit
Yahoo
5 days ago
- Automotive
- Yahoo
Ford's 'Model T moment' leaves analysts wanting more, calling it a risk
When Ford Motor Co. CEO Jim Farley took the stage at the company's Louisville Assembly Plant in Kentucky on Aug. 11, he referenced company founder Henry Ford and the Model-T car multiple times. After all, he had promised Wall Street analysts last month that the Aug. 11 announcement would be a "Model-T moment." Farley's big news was that Ford had innovated a new electric vehicle manufacturing process and a new EV platform, both of which will allow the automaker to more efficiently bring several lower-cost EVs to market. Farley said the first EV to come from these new innovations would be a midsize, four-door electric pickup that starts at $30,000 and is due to launch in 2027. Ford is investing $2 billion in the Louisville plant to retool it starting later this year to adopt the Ford Universal EV Production System to make the pickup, which Ford believes will be profitable within 12 months of its launch. It's what Ford needs given it loses about $1 billion a quarter on its EV sales now. That new process will transform the traditional assembly line into an 'assembly tree." So instead of one long conveyor, there will be three sub-assemblies that run down their own lines simultaneously and then join together. It's meant to reduce the use of parts, speed up assembly, add efficiency and be easier on workers' bodies — and Ford said it's never been done before. "We're taking a risk," Farley said, noting there are no guarantees that the new system will work out. Still, he said, 'we're taking the fight to the competition including the Chinese, with our teams across the United States: designers in California, engineers from Michigan, American workers right here in Louisville. For too long, legacy automakers played it safe." Wall Street shrugs Ford's innovation is noteworthy, analysts said, but it fell short of a Model-T comparison, many said. The Model-T was the vehicle that helped Ford perfect the assembly line process and deliver a high-quality, adaptable and affordable car that put America on wheels in the early 1900s. Ford's new EV production process and platform are yet to be executed and they come with risks, analysts said. And, without giving analysts a peek at the upcoming new midsize EV pickup, Wall Street shrugged at the news. Ford's stock price closed down on Aug. 11 by 0.27% at $11.14. "With so many things Ford has done over the years, it will ultimately come down to execution," Sam Abuelsamid, vice president of market research at Telemetry, told the Detroit Free Press. "They can talk, but if they can't execute and get it all done and done on time, then it won't matter. That is the big challenge." Abuelsamid said the challenge is not just getting the assembly right or the vehicle nailed down; it's the software, too. "It takes totally new software and this is something that Ford and most legacy automakers have struggled with," he said. "There's lots of things that can go wrong. They're implementing a whole new manufacturing process, which is not new to the industry, but it's new to Ford. Ford has not done large scale die casting before or implemented a new software platform.' But if Ford can pull it off, it's a huge step forward for the company, Abuelsamid said. High risk to do what's never been done Abuelsamid said while the development of the Universal EV Production System and Universal EV Platform are "revolutionary" for Ford because no legacy automakers — those who've been around for decades — are doing them, it is not completely new in some ways. "Ford is not the first to adopt this type of overall vehicle architecture with large scale castings for the front and rear structures and a structural battery pack that forms the floor," Abuelsamid said, describing Ford's new Universal Production System and Universal EV platform. Abuelsamid, who is trained as a mechanical engineer, said those castings and battery pack flooring were first used by Tesla for Model Ys a few years ago with the 4680 battery pack, a lithium-ion battery developed by Tesla. It has since be adopted by numerous Chinese EV makers, including the Xpeng G6, Abuelsamid said. "Ford hasn't yet revealed many details of their specific assembly process or other aspects of the vehicle so we can't really judge how much more advanced they are, if at all," he said. Ford leaders told reporters that their focus is on efficiency and they will have better efficiency than anyone else out there using similar processes. Doug Field, Ford's chief EV, digital and design officer, drew on the Model-T comparison to tell reporters that the Universal Production and Platforms will deliver affordability and be sustainable similar to how the Model-T served Ford. To make these new processes work, Ford had to make a lot of new investments. For example, the unicasting process, which produces a giant piece of aluminum, came from new machines Ford purchased. But Field said by building a vehicle using the unicasting process, it reduces the need for parts. That means in the upcoming midsize electric pickup, Ford was able to remove 4,000 feet of electrical wiring from previous generation EVs using the new Universal Production process, Field said. "When we now build this in the tree, with the three pieces and bring them together, everything is going to change," Field told the plant assembly line workers in Louisville. "If we can pull this off, you'll never put an instrument panel or a seat through a door opening again. This way of building a vehicle, we're confident, is the first time anyone's done this anywhere in the world.' A return on investment is years out Morningstar autos analyst David Whiston said the proof remains to be seen as to whether this announcement really does equate to a Model-T moment. "If it ends up being a platform that restarts mass interest in EVs, then yes," Whiston told the Detroit Free Press. "Hard to get excited about a vehicle you can't see yet though. The manufacturing techniques suggest a way to be competitive with Chinese EV firms, which is critical to compete with them." Farley has long benchmarked the Chinese automakers, viewing them as offering top-notch technology at affordable prices that Ford will need to beat if it is to survive another 122 years. As the Free Press reported, Farley started taking his leadership team to Shanghai and other big markets in China a couple times a year starting about two years ago. The team drives China-made vehicles, talks to the experts in China, studies the technology and the customer service to ensure Ford has the right partnerships and strategy to succeed. Whiston said it will take high sales volume of this new midsize EV pickup to erase Ford's $4 billion-plus annual losses in its Model-e electric vehicle unit and "that's a ways off still." Then, there is the risk the EV won't appeal to consumers, some of whom just do not want to own an EV. In that case billions will have been wasted if sales don't take off. "So Farley was right today to call out the risk," Whiston said. "That's why you need great product, great range and lower battery and vehicle manufacturing techniques — which they announced." 'A good poker move' Also, even at a competitive price point, politics cannot be ignored, Abuelsamid added. 'There is a part of the population that said, 'Nope, not going to buy an EV,' ' Abuelsamid said. 'And, who knows what the (President Donald) Trump administration will do to undermine EVs. All of those are potential risk factors to Ford, too.' But there are those that say the innovation is just that: innovative and smart. "This is an aggressive and smart move for Ford to seize market share with cheaper EVs. The market is missing a cheaper EV and Ford sees the window of opportunity," said Dan Ives, managing director and senior equity analyst at Wedbush Securities. "There could be some growing pains with this strategy but it's a good poker move in our view." Abuelsamid said he sees the play as smart, too, in some ways despite the risks. For one thing, part of the reason people have stayed away from EVs is because they've been too expensive, he said. So with the starting price for a gasoline-powered Maverick XL pickup at $28,000 and the bigger gasoline-powered Ranger pickup at $33,500, this new midsize EV will fall in the middle. Ford has said the EV will be closer in size to a Maverick, but offer more interior leg room due to the design and the new EV platform. 'You eliminated affordability as a challenge and you've got a form factor that Americans like to buy: They're very much into midsize pickup trucks. The midsize segment is doing great," Abuelsamid said. "The way they're building this platform, they can build SUVs and cars on this architecture and so consumers will have an option on what to buy.' Ford's top-secret team tasked to compete Ford's Field said the automaker broke with tradition to develop the new manufacturing process, the platform and even the midsize EV pickup — which it will reveal to the public at a later date. He said a Henry Ford quote served as constant inspiration: 'The Model-T was affordable, not because there was a thrifted version of other cars out there. It was the result of brilliant minds taking fundamentally new approaches to old problems.' Field said Ford took a new approach, starting small with a handpicked team of the best people inside and outside of Ford who were "dying for a chance to challenge convention." "We ran the team differently," Field said. "It had a fraction of the typical oversight and much lower numbers of people. We didn't allow people who needed to be managed on the program. We wanted leaders." Every member was expected to understand how their work affected the entire project and to prioritize the total cost and the way the EV would be built. "One of our mantras was: 'The best part is no part,' " Field said. "So we locked the doors, we kept the project secret to shield it from well-intended, but sometimes disruptive corporate oversight. Even Jim (Farley) would joke that he wasn't sure his badge worked on the building.' Field said the team had access to everything that Ford offers, and the team had permission to question everything. 'To ensure focus we also made sure the entire team was in one building in California. The designers, the aerodynamicists, the people doing the manufacturing work and decisions were made really quickly," Field said. "We wouldn't have gotten this far with this much innovation otherwise.' He said the efficiency they came up with in the new EV platform and process will allow Ford to get the same range on EVs, but with one-third less battery, which is "the kind of ingenuity that Ford needs to compete with the Chinese." 'Are we going to compete on labor to make batteries, no?" Field said. "But if we use our brains to have a third smaller battery, we can compete.' Ford will start making the batteries for this new EV at its BlueOval Battery Park in Marshall, Michigan, next year. More: Ford has spent 18 months trying to fix quality problem that's costing company billions Jamie L. LaReau is the senior autos writer who covers Ford Motor Co. for the Detroit Free Press. Contact Jamie at jlareau@ Follow her on Twitter @jlareauan. To sign up for our autos newsletter. Become a subscriber. This story was updated to add a video. This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Ford's 'Model T moment' leaves analysts wanting more, calling it a risk Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Politico
12-06-2025
- Automotive
- Politico
GM slow-rolls its all-EV aspirations
General Motors quietly closed the door this week on a goal to make only electric vehicles by 2035. The automaker announced Tuesday that it would spend $4 billion on mostly gasoline-powered vehicles. While GM is not retreating from EVs, the investment means the company is 'giving up any hope of achieving that [2035] goal,' said Sam Abuelsamid, an auto analyst at Telemetry, a Detroit-area research firm. Asked Wednesday whether the goal still exists, GM said in a statement, 'We still believe in an all-EV future.' GM's move away from the 2035 goal is less a singular failure and more a symptom of flagging support among many actors, including government, other automakers, charging companies and car buyers, analysts said. Much has changed since GM set the EV target, just after President Joe Biden took office and amid a surge of confidence in the auto industry about widespread EV adoption. Four years later, the Trump administration is dismantling Biden-era federal support for EVs and implementing high tariffs, upsetting automakers' production plans. Those federal moves, combined with a cooling desire for EVs among car buyers, has moved the sunset date for the internal combustion engine to a vague someday. GM is still ramping up EV production. Earlier this week, it trumpeted the fact that it sold 37,000 EVs in the first quarter of the year, making it the number two EV maker in the U.S. behind Tesla. The company's 2035 goal 'was aspirational. It was more an idea than a strategy,' said Alan Baum, an independent Detroit auto analyst. 'GM's doing a better job than many of their competitors, but there's obviously a relatively low ceiling because of the lack of supportive policy.' GM's all-EV goal back in 2021 was one of the earliest and most prominent of a wave of automaker commitments to electric vehicles. At the time, GM CEO Mary Barra encouraged others to 'follow suit and make a significant impact on our industry and on the economy as a whole.' Others did follow — and all of those promises have been tempered by new realities. Last year, European automakers Volvo, Porsche, Volkswagen and Mercedes all dropped earlier goals that would have seen them producing all or mostly EVs by the early 2030s. Back in 2021, GM also put an asterisk on its 2035 target. 'We say it as an aspirational goal, because to actually make that timing, we need some external things to come together also,' spokesperson Jessica James said at the time. Barra reiterated last month that the company still wants an 'all-EV future.' 'EVs are fundamentally better,' she said at a Wall Street Journal event late last month. 'We have work to do to continue to get battery technology to give us greater density, so we have farther range. We need to have a robust charging infrastructure.' Automakers, including GM, have been mostly mum in public as the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress seek to kill tax incentives that make it cheaper for manufacturers to produce batteries and consumers to buy EVs. But through the main U.S. automotive lobby, the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, automakers have vociferously opposed California's plans to require all-electric auto sales by 2035. The Republican-controlled Congress voted to kill that California 2035 all-EV sales goal — the same one that GM first set for itself — through the Congressional Review Act. The move came after the Senate parliamentarian told lawmakers they couldn't repeal the goal through the CRA. The bill awaits a signature by Trump, after which the California attorney general has pledged to sue. GM's announcement that it would invest $4 billion in domestic manufacturing essentially shuffles production among factories in ways that will help the company dodge Trump's tariffs. It is moving production of about a half-million gasoline-powered vehicles from Mexico to factories in the U.S., according to an analysis by Abuelsamid of Telemetry. Doing so will enable GM to avoid 25 percent tariffs that the Trump administration has placed on vehicles imported from Mexico. For example, the production of several full-size SUVs and pickup trucks will transfer to GM's Orion plant, north of Detroit. The gas-powered Equinox, a strong U.S. seller, will move to the Fairfax plant in Kansas City. The gas-running Blazer will go to the company's Spring Hill plant in Tennessee. Meanwhile, more EV production will move to GM's Factory Zero, a dedicated EV plant in metro Detroit that is running far below capacity. Electric versions of the Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra pickup trucks will now get made in the plant, alongside other large EVs made in low volumes, including the Cadillac Escalade IQ and the Hummer. Other EVs will be made elsewhere. Other electric Cadillacs, for example, will be made at the Spring Hill plant, while a rebooted version of the Chevy Bolt will be produced at the Fairfax plant, which the company described as the site for the 'next generation of affordable EVs.' Those changes, combined with other recent moves, make it clear that GM is laying the groundwork to produce gas-powered vehicles well into the 2030s. In May, the Detroit automaker said it would ditch plans to make electric motors at its Towanda Production plant in Buffalo, New York, and instead spend $888 million to make V-8 engines. In 2023, GM put $579 million toward refurbishing an engine plant in Flint, Michigan. Electric vehicles don't have engines — they rely instead on batteries for propulsion. Engine factories are large, fixed investments that are meant to operate for 15 years or more, according to Neal Ganguli, a managing director and auto-manufacturing expert at the business advisory firm AlixPartners. Meanwhile, the manufacturing lines that make finished cars — like the ones GM unveiled this week — have shorter but still lengthy lives. 'When you put these [manufacturing lines] in, you are planning on a five- to seven-year time horizon,' Ganguli said. 'Maybe 10 years.' Analysts said General Motors' swerve back into the gasoline lane — and away from the path to all EVs by 2035 — is not a surprise, given the market and policy realities. 'It was always a long shot at best,' said Abuelsamid.
E&E News
12-06-2025
- Automotive
- E&E News
GM slow-rolls its all-EV aspirations
General Motors quietly closed the door this week on a goal to make only electric vehicles by 2035. The automaker announced Tuesday that it would spend $4 billion on mostly gasoline-powered vehicles. While GM is not retreating from EVs, the investment means the company is 'giving up any hope of achieving that [2035] goal,' said Sam Abuelsamid, an auto analyst at Telemetry, a Detroit-area research firm. Asked Wednesday whether the goal still exists, GM said in a statement, 'We still believe in an all-EV future.' Advertisement GM's move away from the 2035 goal is less a singular failure and more a symptom of flagging support among many actors, including government, other automakers, charging companies and car buyers, analysts said. Much has changed since GM set the EV target, just after President Joe Biden took office and amid a surge of confidence in the auto industry about widespread EV adoption. Four years later, the Trump administration is dismantling Biden-era federal support for EVs and implementing high tariffs, upsetting automakers' production plans. Those federal moves, combined with a cooling desire for EVs among car buyers, has moved the sunset date for the internal combustion engine to a vague someday. GM is still ramping up EV production. Earlier this week, it trumpeted the fact that it sold 37,000 EVs in the first quarter of the year, making it the number two EV maker in the U.S. behind Tesla. The company's 2035 goal 'was aspirational. It was more an idea than a strategy,' said Alan Baum, an independent Detroit auto analyst. 'GM's doing a better job than many of their competitors, but there's obviously a relatively low ceiling because of the lack of supportive policy.' GM's all-EV goal back in 2021 was one of the earliest and most prominent of a wave of automaker commitments to electric vehicles. At the time, GM CEO Mary Barra encouraged others to 'follow suit and make a significant impact on our industry and on the economy as a whole.' Others did follow — and all of those promises have been tempered by new realities. Last year, European automakers Volvo, Porsche, Volkswagen and Mercedes all dropped earlier goals that would have seen them producing all or mostly EVs by the early 2030s. Back in 2021, GM also put an asterisk on its 2035 target. 'We say it as an aspirational goal, because to actually make that timing, we need some external things to come together also,' spokesperson Jessica James said at the time. Barra reiterated last month that the company still wants an 'all-EV future.' 'EVs are fundamentally better,' she said at a Wall Street Journal event late last month. 'We have work to do to continue to get battery technology to give us greater density, so we have farther range. We need to have a robust charging infrastructure.' Automakers, including GM, have been mostly mum in public as the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress seek to kill tax incentives that make it cheaper for manufacturers to produce batteries and consumers to buy EVs. But through the main U.S. automotive lobby, the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, automakers have vociferously opposed California's plans to require all-electric auto sales by 2035. The Republican-controlled Congress voted to kill that California 2035 all-EV sales goal — the same one that GM first set for itself — through the Congressional Review Act. The move came after the Senate parliamentarian told lawmakers they couldn't repeal the goal through the CRA. The bill awaits a signature by Trump, after which the California attorney general has pledged to sue. What GM is doing GM's announcement that it would invest $4 billion in domestic manufacturing essentially shuffles production among factories in ways that will help the company dodge Trump's tariffs. It is moving production of about a half-million gasoline-powered vehicles from Mexico to factories in the U.S., according to an analysis by Abuelsamid of Telemetry. Doing so will enable GM to avoid 25 percent tariffs that the Trump administration has placed on vehicles imported from Mexico. For example, the production of several full-size SUVs and pickup trucks will transfer to GM's Orion plant, north of Detroit. The gas-powered Equinox, a strong U.S. seller, will move to the Fairfax plant in Kansas City. The gas-running Blazer will go to the company's Spring Hill plant in Tennessee. Meanwhile, more EV production will move to GM's Factory Zero, a dedicated EV plant in metro Detroit that is running far below capacity. Electric versions of the Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra pickup trucks will now get made in the plant, alongside other large EVs made in low volumes, including the Cadillac Escalade IQ and the Hummer. Other EVs will be made elsewhere. Other electric Cadillacs, for example, will be made at the Spring Hill plant, while a rebooted version of the Chevy Volt will be produced at the Fairfax plant, which the company described as the site for the 'next generation of affordable EVs.' Those changes, combined with other recent moves, make it clear that GM is laying the groundwork to produce gas-powered vehicles well into the 2030s. In May, the Detroit automaker said it would ditch plans to make electric motors at its Towanda Production plant in Buffalo, New York, and instead spend $888 million to make V-8 engines. In 2023, GM put $579 million toward refurbishing an engine plant in Flint, Michigan. Electric vehicles don't have engines — they rely instead on batteries for propulsion. Engine factories are large, fixed investments that are meant to operate for 15 years or more, according to Neal Ganguli, a managing director and auto-manufacturing expert at the business advisory firm AlixPartners. Meanwhile, the manufacturing lines that make finished cars — like the ones GM unveiled this week — have shorter but still lengthy lives. 'When you put these [manufacturing lines] in, you are planning on a five- to seven-year time horizon,' Ganguli said. 'Maybe 10 years.' Analysts said General Motors' swerve back into the gasoline lane — and away from the path to all EVs by 2035 — is not a surprise, given the market and policy realities. 'It was always a long shot at best,' said Abuelsamid.
Miami Herald
14-05-2025
- Automotive
- Miami Herald
Inside this ‘virtual reality arena,' Stellantis aims to build a better car factory
AUBURN HILLS, Michigan - Deep inside the sprawling Chrysler Technology Center is a metal structure equipped with sensors that Stellantis NV engineers call their "virtual reality arena." Stepping into this VR laboratory, the engineers don headsets, pick up controllers, and are virtually transported to an assembly line inside any one of the automaker's North American production facilities. They can simulate what it's like to attach the doors to a Toledo-made Jeep Wrangler SUV, or connect wiring on the underbody of a Sterling Heights-built Ram 1500 pickup. The purpose behind the lab is to improve the automaker's existing assembly lines and help design new factories, specialists said in a Thursday demonstration. In virtual reality, engineers can try out out ergonomic or efficiency improvements, they said, or mock up how to install new equipment at an employee's workstation. "It's very costly to shut down an assembly plant - we never want to do that; we're not making products for our customers," said Keenan O'Brien, head of the automaker's Process Engineering Center. "So doing as much as we can in the digital world beforehand shortens that period in which we have to rely on physical trials and prototypes to get things up and running." The virtual reality room opened in 2018 and has been continually updated with better software and equipment. Several trackers mounted on the metal frame trace the movements of the person working below on the "assembly line." Stellantis has created digital mock-ups of all of its North American assembly plants and simulations of most of those plants' operations, said Joe Dzwonkowski, a virtual reality design review specialist. The automaker has in recent years opened similar VR labs at several of its European and South American sites. Even before construction began on the Detroit Assembly Complex-Mack plant that builds the Jeep Grant Cherokee more than five years ago, Dzwonkowski noted, engineers were already working inside a "digital twin" of the factory. In other instances, virtual testing helps update plants that are being converted to make new models. Those include factories switching over to make electric vehicles, which have new production processes and ergonomic concerns tied to building and installing batteries. Other automakers are using virtual reality in similar ways, said Sam Abuelsamid, vice president of market research at communications firm Telemetry, who attended this week's Stellantis demonstration. For years, some carmakers have used it on the product design side of their operations; Abuelsamid recalled in 2016 attending a virtual walkaround of the Lucid Air electric sedan at the Los Angeles Auto Show. But others like BMW AG and Mercedes-Benz Group AG are also using digital mock-ups to improve their manufacturing designs in similar ways as Stellantis, he said. Mercedes and chipmaker Nvidia, for instance, partnered two years ago to digitize the automaker's production processes to make better factories. Near the Stellantis virtual reality arena is a 3D printer - another tool that the automaker has increasingly turned to in recent years to improve its manufacturing sites. All of the company's North American assembly plants have been equipped with 3D printing capabilities over the last few years, said Don Clack, a 3D printing and mixed reality specialist. Those capabilities have continually improved, and the printers can now churn out hand tools used by workers, or parts and fixtures needed to keep the assembly line running. "If it can fit into the 3D printer, we can design it," said Clack, who noted that the printers use a mix of carbon fiber and fiberglass to generate components with metal-like strength. The 3D printers at each plant are helping employees respond to tricky problems. In one notable instance at Mack, a printed component helped the factory's paint shop create a cleaner two-tone paint process for the Grand Cherokee, where the dark roof needed to be crisply differentiated from the rest of the SUV's paint color. In other instances, Clack said, 3D printed parts prevented entire assembly plants from shutting down after a critical component broke down. "We really believe in keeping those (3D printing) labs as close to production as possible, so that they understand the pain points that the plant has, and then they can be agile in their responses," he said. Copyright (C) 2025, Tribune Content Agency, LLC. Portions copyrighted by the respective providers.
