The northern rim of the Czech Republic is home to one of the newest automotive paintshops currently in operation and, according to its operator, it is also one of the most innovative in the world. The €214.5m ($238.78m) installation at Skoda’s Mladá Boleslav plant, which began operating in August of this year, has a total floorspace of 25,094 sq.m and will process 168,000 car bodies a year with a maximum possible daily throughput of around 700. This boosts the total painting capacity of the plant to 812,000 vehicles a year, since it will supplement, not replace, the existing paintshop resource. At 35 metres in height, the structure is also the carmaker’s tallest building.

More pertinently, the key hallmarks of the installation are its high levels of automation, commitment to energy saving, and environmentally benign technologies. On the first of those counts the installation will, most obviously, operate 66 robots. On the second, relevant figures compared to existing levels for similar work include a 20% reduction in power consumption, mainly due to what Skoda describes as a unique paint drying procedure…