I woke up this morning after a great night of sleep and couldn’t wait to get to our site visit for today – Audi. On the ride to the factory in Ingolstadt, Fox, Evan, and I played Crazy 8 on our phones for an hour and a half. It was definitely the hardest I’ve laughed in a long time because we kept giving Fox double +4 cards and it was hilarious. The drive felt super fast and next thing we knew, we were at the factory. We split into two groups, and my group toured the factory first. It was probably one of the craziest things I’ve ever seen. It had the futuristic look of the GROB factory, but on a massive scale. It also had the robotic aspect of the Faurecia factory, but again on a much larger scale, and a higher percentage of the factory was automated. I believe the worker said that around 90% of the process was automated, which is wild. We began in the section where they stamped the metal into the shapes of the body panel. This area was almost entirely robotic, and it was crazy to watch the machines move the pieces to each station and shape them so efficiently. I was blown away by how precise the massive robots could be while still moving shockingly fast. We then moved on to the body-shop, where the pieces were combined and eventually the power train was combined with the body. The process was unbelievably cool and complex. When standing at the end of one of the rows, it looked like an endless hallway of cars being carried above our heads and assembled by robots. I would have loved to get a picture because the scale and futuristic-ness of it is hard to describe.

After leaving the factory, we had time to visit the museum before the presentation. Fortunately, I could take pictures here. The museum was separated onto floors which corresponded with different time periods of Audi. The highest floor showcased some of their first cars and got more modern as the floors went down.

At the bottom, was their modern cars as well as some futuristic concept cars, which looked absolutely crazy. Going up the entire building was a sort of rotating elevator of tons of different Audi race and rally cars, which we watched for a long time. I could have probably spent all day in there, but we had to move on to our presentation, which I will talk about below all these pictures.

The presentation was given to us by two employees of Audi working on the business end of the company in product planning and development. The majority of the presentation had to do with the future of Audi and their advancement into the electric car market, as well as what processes are involved with making such a large internal change. I’m not sure if I am allowed to say anything about their strategies, so I won’t risk anything, but they have a lot of ambitious goals in terms of the electric vehicle market. One concept we talked about was the infrastructure required to accommodate electric vehicles, and how the company is investing into making electric vehicles more feasible for consumers. I also asked if the chargers themselves could be profitable, but there was not a clear answer to that because there are so many unknowns within the industry. Overall, the presentation was amazing, and it was great to see some of the thought processes that go into making these decisions, and how much planning is necessary to be successful in such a large market. At the end of it, I decided I want to work for Audi now (changed my mind from GROB after we visited them haha).

After the presentation, we rode back to the University to listen to an analyst for Bloomburg talk about the European car market. His name was Stefan Nicola, and he had a ton of good insight on the market as a whole, which was cool to see because it was from an outside perspective and not from a company. He talked about a lot of ideas, but mainly how the European manufacturers are interacting with the European and global markets for electric vehicles, as well as some of the obstacles in the way of going fully electric. One obstacle was the raw materials required to make the batteries for the vehicles. I asked a question about how I knew there were some unethical sourcing practices in the raw material industry, such as cobalt and lithium, and how companies plan to deal with this, as well as if it will lead to more drawbacks in going fully electric. He explained that many companies have initiatives to help correct this issue, and because companies invest into the entire value chain, some companies may be putting money into the sourcing of these materials and improve the process themselves. He also mentioned that they are working on sourcing lithium in Europe now, whereas currently it is being sourced mainly in lower income countries with bad working conditions. Another interesting parallel he made with companies like Faurecia, was the idea that using hydrogen fuel cells to power electric vehicles would mainly be applicable in large vehicles with more space for the tanks. It will definitely be interesting to see how hydrogen fuel plays out in the future.

I think today has been my favorite day so far, between the Audi factory and museum, and listening to Stefan talk about the industry as a whole. Time to get ready to have fun in Munich tomorrow!