The last Australian car-maker may have closed down its operations a year ago, but one big automotive brand remains fully committed to continuing to manufacture here, writes Peter Jones, Managing Director of Nissan Casting Australia.
At Nissan, we have been manufacturing parts in south-east Melbourne for more than 35 years. While Australia’s automotive manufacturing industry has taken a battering in recent times, it is a source of enormous pride that we continue to manufacture parts locally for vehicles that wind up on Australian roads and on motorways all over the world.
The parts we produce in our Nissan Casting Plant (NCAP) are carefully manufactured by a team of 192 highly skilled workers, spread across three shifts per day, seven days a week. This concentration of skill and experience results in approximately 2.6 million die-cast aluminium parts and over 16,000 tow bars annually, with an export value of $82.5m.
We have experts in high and low-pressure die casting, precision machining, component assembly and accessories manufacturing, and we currently create 60 different parts specific to oil pans, gearbox and final-drive housing, as well as parts for electric vehicles, including the Inverter Water Jacket and Stator Housing. These parts are critically important to our global business, seeing distribution to Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi (Alliance) vehicle assembly plants, and Nissan affiliate powertrain plants as far and wide as Japan, the UK, the US, Thailand, Mexico, and South Korea.
For anyone concerned that we will follow the prevailing trend of Australian automotive manufacturing, let me reassure you: we are dedicated to local manufacturing for the foreseeable future, with exclusive supply contracts awarded by Nissan Global that will keep the plant operating well into the next decade. There should be no doubt that Nissan is still a fully integrated original equipment car manufacturer here in Australia, and we are determined to continue to defy the belief that automotive manufacturing doesn’t have a place in our country.
If you want evidence that ‘Made in Australia’ is alive and kicking in our automotive industry, you need look no further than the 90,000sqm block of real estate in Dandenong South (SE of Melbourne) – one of the nation’s busiest manufacturing hotspots. There, you’ll find us proudly including a kangaroo insignia on all of our parts, helping promote local manufacturing to the world.
These components ultimately find their way into vehicles like the Nissan QASHQAI, which includes a locally built gear carrier and rear cover; the Pathfinder, featuring Aussie-made oil pan assembly; and the Nissan X-TRAIL, which includes final drive unit parts.
Nissan isn’t the only make that benefits from our manufacturing prowess, with the Renault Koleos also including Aussie-made final drive unit parts, and the INFINITI Q50 rolling out of the dealership packing our expertly crafted gear carrier. The use of our parts extends to more than 30 overseas models, including the world’s highest-selling electric vehicle (EV), the Nissan LEAF, which includes an EV water jacket inverter, inverter cover, inverter case, and motor stator housing that all come directly out of Dandenong.
Committed to manufacturing products of the highest quality, we have worked with companies like the CSIRO to develop technologies that guarantee the very best in workmanship. Together we have improved the welding methods for die repair, and improved the materials in dies and the coating of die steels, to ensure we get the most out of our equipment. This means our equipment lasts longer, bringing down our costs.
Our quality department uses the same kind of measuring machines and granite tables used by Formula One teams. These parts are so precise that they match up exactly with parts made in Japan to a tolerance of 15 microns, less than the diameter of a human hair. And it’s this precision that has earned us exclusive contracts for the supply of specific parts. I’m very proud to say that the team in our quality department played a large role in securing even more business from Nissan Global, some of which is exclusive to Nissan Casting Australia.
In the last two years we have committed over $11m to our NCAP facility. During this time we have updated the tooling equipment and the dies, introduced more assembly equipment and upped the number of new machines. This has helped us increase capacity and it ensures the quality of our product is to a global standard.
With plenty of work keeping the casting plant busy as it heads towards 2025, we are investing a further $1.8m on cost reduction activities using automation. We have a number of robots at NCAP and we are increasing numbers. But we are also investing in co-bots – or collaborative robots. This is automated equipment that works with an operator, and this is exciting for us because we are one of the first to use this state-of-the-art technology. We also have further plans to increase the number of Automated Guided Vehicles – which are common in automotive manufacturing plants around the world.
As the world turns its attention to EVs, so too will we, investing in new and existing equipment to ensure we maintain our global reputation for quality, state-of-the-art EV products that are designed for new and next-generation electric and hybrid vehicles. To achieve this, we have updated the control systems on the die cast machines, and installed new technologies, such as oil-based die spray, helium leak testing, and the continued investment in automated assembly to allow NCAP to achieve the increased quality requirements of EV parts.
In fact, NCAP has the most advanced oil-based die-spray equipment across the Nissan network, and we are the only Nissan manufacturing plant, globally, to conduct helium leak testing. This investment was supported by financial grants from the Victorian State Government and the Federal Government, both of which understand the importance of continued local manufacturing.
While this innovation is exciting, we are also determined to invest in people. We employ and continually train a highly skilled workforce made up of Aussies who are passionate about the brand and dedicated to producing the very best products, ensuring global demand for ‘Australian Made’ won’t go away any time soon.