Electronics Production | March 15, 2017

Electric car startup looking to build factory in Sweden

Swedish Uniti has just recently moved to larger facilities to complete their evaluation prototype – to be unveiled in September – but the company is already planning a fully automated factory for mass production.

Electric car startup Uniti Sweden announces its fully automated car production facility to be in Sweden, in a new foundation partnership with Siemens Nordics. The ‘industry 4.0’ facility will be focusing on sustainable manufacture of composite materials for the light electric vehicle space, as well as automated vehicle assembly. This approach greatly simplifies the manufacturing process and reduces the carbon footprint exponentially. The facility will be capable of producing up to 50’000 units per year within its first year of production due to a revolutionary method of robotic composite manufacturing and assembly, the company states in a press release. As of right now the electric car start-up has moved into a temporary new production facility in Lund, Sweden, for its prototyping phase. Uniti is planning to unveil the prototype in the fall of 2017, which will take place in the future manufacturing space. The partnership between Uniti Sweden and Siemens PLM in the Nordics is based on the Siemens’ software suite that enables the entire production process to be planned in a virtual setting before implementation in the physical world. “Our PLM portfolio has become so perfected including our recent acquisitions that the first vehicle produced on the physical production line can be sold directly to the customer with no test vehicles needed”, Mats Friberg, CEO of Siemens PLM Software in the Nordics, explains in the press release. “We have also agreed to jointly define how to bring the Siemens Automation Portfolio to the task of connecting the virtual world with the real world”, says Ulf Troedsson, CEO of Siemens AB. The fully-automated production line will commence setup within 18 months to deliver the first vehicles by 2019. “The partnership with Siemens is essential to our long-term plans as we now have the opportunity to not only develop a sustainable car, but also manufacture it in a sustainable way at a large scale, faster and with a significantly lower initial capital demand”, explains Lewis Horne, CEO of Uniti Sweden. Lewis Horne explains that due to the current rate of growth Uniti have had to move locations twice in one year. “The next facility we move into will be our manufacturing space in Malmö or Landskrona, and that will be big enough for us to settle in for the long haul.”

More on Uniti's journey towards mass production