Mazda brings part of CX-5 wiring back to Japan, with robots

Inside every car runs a wire harness, the bundle of cables and connectors that carries power and signals to each system. Building one is still largely manual work: to fit differing vehicle specifications, a large number of wires and terminals must be combined, and many steps remain hand-done. On October 15, Mazda Motor Corporation and Yazaki Corporation announced that they had automated part of that assembly for the all-new Mazda CX-5. Mazda will also switch part of its supply of a crucial vehicle component to domestic production.

Automation could not be reached through equipment or robotics alone. The work is delicate and complex, so the two companies redesigned the product and the process at the same time, starting from the early stage. The payoff shows up in the variants: the number of wire harness variants used in the all-new CX-5 falls by approximately 80%, and the new production method was adopted for the first time in that model.

Finished harnesses are assembled at a Yazaki affiliate's plant in Mine City and delivered to Mazda plants in Hiroshima and Yamaguchi prefectures. The arrangement keeps this work in Japan. Autoblog notes that it directly benefits Mazda's Japanese plants.

For Mazda's plants in Hiroshima and Yamaguchi, the gain is already under way, since the all-new CX-5 is the first model built with these harnesses. For Yazaki, the method is meant to travel: both companies plan to apply what they learned to wire harnesses used in future vehicle models. The announcement does not date those models.

The limits are clear. The only quantified result in the coverage is the approximately 80% cut in variants, and it concerns one model. No production volume, cost or savings figure appears in the reports, so the effect on output remains to be measured.