Honda’s new Yorii factory in Saitama Prefecture can build cars for 30% less and 20% more quickly than its existing Sayama plant which means it can make money on even base models.
The company opened the doors to its advanced and highly automated plant last week. The factory began operations in July and reached full production of 1,050 Fit (Jazz) models a day by mid-October.
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Honda president Takanobu Ito told reporters that the new factory will act as a mother plant, developing production technologies that can be adopted by overseas manufacturing bases in Brazil, China, Mexico and Thailand from next spring.
The highly automated plant uses new welding robots that are twice as fast as existing robots and also uses assembly robots for many tasks typically done by hand, such as attaching suspensions and other main parts to the chassis.
Production at the Sayama plant has been cut from two to one lines, keeping overall domestic output at around 1m units a year.
Honda has previously stated that it is argeting global sales of 6m cars in fiscal 2016, up 50% from fiscal 2012.
