As global automakers make the high-profile transition to electric vehicles, the Canadian automation company ATS Corp. is quietly carving out a niche by building the assembly lines that enable automakers to piece together the batteries.
The battery pack tucked beneath the floor of a typical EV has about 6,500 cells, and the automated lines made by ATS can produce one of these packs in just 60 seconds, said Udo Panenka, president of industrial automation at the Cambridge, Ont.-based company.
“That means you have 13,000 welds that you need to produce in one minute,” Panenka said. “If one weld is defective, the range of the vehicle drops by 1.7 per cent, and people don’t want to have the range dropping.”
The stakes are higher still, given that many of ATS’ customers run their automated lines 24/7, producing US$1 billion to $2 billion worth of battery packs per year on each line.
Announcements of big-ticket battery plants have become commonplace across North America only in the past few years, but ATS has been designing and building automated battery lines for about 15 years, said company CEO Andrew Hider.
As EVs have transitioned from smaller-scale production to the mass market, the company has expanded its core technology and has been pushed by customers that need specialized solutions for their batteries, Hider told Automotive News Canada.
“Often these customers are making these big announcements, and then they’ve got to figure [execution] out,” he said.
‘SUPERAGGRESSIVE TIMELINES’
With the auto industry shifting to EVs at high speed, battery projects involve fast-changing technology and “superaggressive timelines,” Panenka said.
“Everything changes,” he said. “Just one thing doesn’t change, and that’s the launch date.”
ATS has delivered more than 110 battery assembly systems to customers worldwide, with most of its early orders coming from Europe before the recent shift to North America. Decades before the battery boom, ATS built automation equipment for gearboxes, motors and other auto components.
ATS, founded in 1978, also makes automated lines for customers in health care, the food industry, consumer products and energy. It officially rebranded as ATS Corp. in 2022, paring down from ATS Automation Tooling Systems Inc.
ATS has six manufacturing plants in Canada and employs about 1,400 people. Globally, it has more than 50 manufacturing sites and more than 6,000 employees.
Growing battery business has added to this tally. In March 2022, for instance, the company opened a pair of 240,000-square-foot (22,000-square-metre) plants on the outskirts of Columbus, Ohio, that will produce assembly lines for battery modules.
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