Advanced Sustainable Manufacturing
Volvo, JLR and Dassault chart advanced path to net zero
Volvo Car Torslanda, JLR and Dassault Systèmes join an AMS livestream to show how battery passports, simulation and energy data are turning sustainability ambition into factory floor results.
Sustainability used to sit in a department separate from production. The message from a recent AMS livestream was that the industry-wide gap between sustainability objectives and the shop floor is closing fast, and the technologies driving that change are largely the same ones driving manufacturing performance on a larger scale. Three speakers, three very different vantage points, and one shared conclusion - that hitting environmental targets and running a profitable factory are no longer competing objectives.
Battery passports turn traceability into a competitive edge
At Volvo Car Torslanda, plant manager Magnus Olsson described a transformation worth SEK 10 billion (more than $1 billion), the largest the Gothenburg plant has undergone in six decades. The investment introduced megacasting and in-house battery pack assembly, allowing Torslanda to build the new electric EX60 alongside the existing XC60 without losing a single day of production.
For every individual battery, we can trace where the raw materials were mined, when they were mined, and eventually where the battery is recycled and how those materials are reused
The bigger shift, Olsson explained, is informational rather than physical. The European Battery Regulation requires every battery sold in the EU to carry its own digital passport from 2027, and Volvo built the necessary systems two years early. "For every individual battery, we can trace where the raw materials were mined, when they were mined, and eventually where the battery is recycled and how those materials are reused," he said.
Front-loading simulation doesn't eliminate physical testing altogether, because physical testing remains essential for correlation, validation and certification
That data trail extends to artificial intelligence on the factory floor, where camera based inspection systems, several of which originated as ideas from production teams themselves, are spreading across roughly 50 Volvo assembly plants. Olsson was careful about how he framed their role. "It's not a question of choosing between people and AI," he said, pointing instead to the limits of vision systems, which depend on a clear line of sight and need constant retraining, leaving people with judgement that machines still lack.
Simulation cuts months out of vehicle development
Jyothi Matam, senior technical leader for systems simulation and AD/ADAS at Dassault Systèmes, made the case for front loading engineering work into simulation long before metal is cut. "Front-loading simulation doesn't eliminate physical testing altogether, because physical testing remains essential for correlation, validation and certification," she said.
Its real value, she added, lies in catching problems much earlier in development, particularly in domains where the underlying physics, crash performance, aerodynamics, thermal behaviour, is already well understood.
Citing Dassault's work with Peugeot Sport on an endurance racing hypercar, Matam described aerodynamic evaluation on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform replacing work that would once have taken months. "Instead of taking several months, these analyses could be completed in around a day, allowing engineers to assess between 3,000 and 4,000 different design variants," she said.
Asked where the industry's biggest remaining barrier lies, her answer was organisational rather than technical. "Breaking down those organisational silos remains one of the industry's biggest challenges," she said.
We've already made considerable progress over the past five or six years, but we still have approximately 60–70% of our Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions reductions ahead of us
Energy data forces a rethink at legacy plants
Garrett Bell, who leads manufacturing transformation at JLR, gave the most candid account of the day. A programme with Tata Consultancy Services to roll out granular energy monitoring at Solihull, one of JLR's oldest plants, taught the company as much about what not to do as what to do. The team ended up tracking more than 5,000 individual data points, considerably more than planned, and Bell put the project's overall success at roughly 60 to 70% of what JLR had originally intended.
The lesson, he said, was that visibility without control achieves little. JLR has since shifted its benchmark to Nitra, its Slovakian plant, where finer metering and fuller production utilisation have driven a 30 to 40% improvement in energy performance over two years.
Under newly appointed Group Chief Strategy Officer, Balaje Rajan, JLR has also brought forward its net zero target from 2039 to 2030. "We've already made considerable progress over the past five or six years, but we still have approximately 60–70% of our Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions reductions ahead of us," Bell said.
Asked to name the industry's single biggest unsolved problem, none of the three pointed to technology. Olsson pointed to people, arguing that an empowered workforce outperforms any single digital system. Matam pointed to organisational silos. Bell pointed to momentum, and to the discipline of spending less time analysing data and more time acting on it.
The full conversation, including extended discussion of vehicle to grid technology, software defined vehicles and circular battery economics, is available now as an on-demand recording on the AMS website.
