Examination of Witnesses (Questions 680-699)
Mr Steve Franklin, Mr Jerry Hardcastle and Mr Peter
Stokes
1 APRIL 2008
Q680 Lord Crickhowell: On repairability,
as seen from the car owner/driver's point of view, there are some
changes which seem to make things worse rather than better—no
doubt there are good reasons why those changes have happened.
For example, exhaust systems: exhaust systems still rust and still
have to be replaced but now it is a much more major operation
because instead of just having a box replaced you find it has
got a catalyst and something or other in it and it is quite a
big component so an awful lot has to be changed. Many of us do
not quite understand why the car bumper has been eliminated entirely
from the back of motor cars; people do still bump their vehicles
in one way or another and now you actually bump in a way that
means you have to replace a large part of the front or back of
your car when in the past you had a bumper for protection. I do
not quite see why some of these minor points cannot be improved
so that not only does the owner have rather less hassle of replacement
than he currently does, but actually I would have thought it would
eliminate a certain amount of waste as well. I am sure there is
a very straightforward answer and I would love to know.
Mr Franklin: I am sure Jerry will have some
answers for that, but just one I can think of immediately is crash.
Obviously we have got to have crumple zones and if you look at
the way a car deforms now the cabin is intact because any energy
is absorbed at the front end on impact. The latest piece of legislation
on pedestrian protection is even more important for having soft
front ends of vehicles to protect the pedestrian, and up to 30
miles per hour all would expect to survive—the bonnet will
rise up so there is no hard landing. I have said in the written
evidence there are a lot of design criteria that we have to mix
and match and not everyone is consistent and they do not all necessarily
help each other out, but that is a specific example there.
Mr Hardcastle: Particularly the bumper area,
as Steve mentioned, is critical for pedestrian impact and there
is strict legislation about how the vehicle impacts on the knee
of a pedestrian and what happens when that occurs. We could fix
a great big bull bar to the front and protect the car but that
would clearly start doing a lot more damage elsewhere so that
is one thing that drives that. Of course, the driver for the catalyst
and making the exhaust system more complicated is the CO2 emissions
from the vehicle, hydrocarbons et cetera. In diesels we are now
fitting diesel particulate filters and all of that is for legislation
or other performance improvements and, unfortunately, then you
get the trade-off that things are becoming more complicated and
they are not the simple vehicles that we were used to in the past.
Q681 Chairman: If we can maybe move
to production waste at this stage, how do you address the challenge
of production waste as designers? If you have been told not perhaps
that you have to have soft-fronted cars and the end of bull bars
but also we want to see reductions in emissions and waste in the
production process itself. What kind of instructions do you give
to your people in that area?
Mr Hardcastle: In terms of production waste,
one key area is that we would design a component so that it can
be made with the least amount of waste material. This is things
like the blankings, so that when you are blanking something out
of steel you would try and make the shape so that it can be nested
in a pattern that does not waste material. That is one thing that
we might be asked to do. Another way to avoid waste is when we
are actually packaging parts for delivery, so we would take parts
and we would maybe change the assembly level or the shape of them
so that we can stack them in a box and get more on the trucks
so that there is less waste in those terms.
Q682 Chairman: What about the supply
chain as well, the people from whom you source your materials?
Mr Hardcastle: We issue a purchasing green guideline
from Nissan to all of our suppliers, so we tend to ask them to
take responsibility for their own waste and recycling. Nissan
as a company just does not like waste.
Q683 Chairman: How do you ensure
that these guidelines you issue are actually followed through?
Do you have somebody who goes around and checks the supplier's
factory or is the pricing mechanism such that they do not have
much room to manoeuvre, they feel they have to recycle and be
as careful as possible?
Mr Hardcastle: The second one is what drives
the waste reduction, we do not have green police but we demand
cost reductions and efficiency improvements year on year on year.
We know inside our own plant that when you demand those kinds
of cost reductions it makes people avoid waste—waste is
expensive in every way. If you do not use the material then you
have to pay to dispose of it so by driving the cost we understand
that that tends to drive the waste reduction at the same time.
We do not police the cost.
Q684 Chairman: You do not actually
police the process by anything other than the margin mechanism
of price.
Mr Hardcastle: No. For example, when we are
painting a part or when we are painting a vehicle there is a huge
cost of wasted paint in monetary terms but also wasted paint and
paint sludge is difficult to dispose of, so it is in our interests
to use as little paint as possible and we have special high pressure
nozzles to spray and also special electrostatic paint so that
it sticks to the body and does not run off. Using those techniques
we drive the cost down and drive the waste down so it is self-fulfilling,
it works, you do not have to bring in a waste policeman in effect.
Mr Franklin: It is something we have been doing
for so long now that we have almost forgotten how good it is,
but we always used to have in our companies goods inwards inspections,
in other words you would buy in from a supplier and then you would
look at everything he sent you and then say yes or no. Now we
have continuous process control which means that 99.9 per cent
is always going to be okay, so what you are actually saying is
that just by looking at that process you know you have eliminated
waste because the quality is assured. Jerry mentioned paintshops;
probably one of the biggest areas of energy use and potential
waste is the old air-spray where you used to wave a spray gun
around, now we programme robots electrostatically and there is
absolutely minimal waste. Two reasons: one is cost, the other
is emissions where once again we are legislated.
Mr Stokes: If I can also add at that point that
post-production scrap is probably some of the easiest scrap to
recycle because it is clean, it is not contaminated with any other
waste as the material would be if it were on a vehicle. Plastics
are routinely now collected and recycled at our factories, as
with any press scraps as well.
Q685 Chairman: One last question
in this area: how do you get the message across to your designers
about, for example, the life-cycle impacts of vehicles and their
components? Do you keep nagging them or is there a means whereby
you get that message across?
Mr Hardcastle: Each component or system that
we develop we give it a performance, cost and weight target as
you would expect, but also for each of the components we conduct
a recyclability assessment. We have some specialists in the company
who can help the designers look at the design and see that we
are achieving recyclability; for example, on a door trim we used
to have 25 different materials and through working together between
the recyclability experts and the designers we are now down to
one mono-material, polypropylene, for every part of the door trim.
That makes it hugely more recyclable than the 25 parts before.
They also did a packaging study on those parts, which is part
of the waste, so there is a system in place which promotes the
activity. Also, from a corporate point of view, we have a Nissan
green programme which is to promote recovery, re-use and recycling
and that Nissan green programme is used externally but it is also
used as a communication internally to encourage all of the staff,
in whatever role—design, manufacturing or administration—to
reduce waste.
Q686 Baroness Platt of Writtle: In
today's Times there is a very interesting pull-out on plastics,
and they have a sector skill council. When you answered the questions
I noticed that the Society did not answer the question on skills.
We all know that there is a great shortage of both science and
engineering skills—and I speak as an engineer—at all
levels, we are talking about chartered, technician and craft,
and I would have thought that you would have had a sector skills
council.
Mr Franklin: We tend to rely on university degrees—
Q687 Baroness Platt of Writtle: I
was thinking about all levels.
Mr Franklin: The Institute of the Motor Industry
does have a similar thing which has a training council. They do
liaise with the SMMT and we do put together packages; unfortunately
I am not that aware of what they are but there are packages of
education which are available. It is either via the Institute
of the Motor Industry or via SMMT and in conjunction with academia.
Q688 Baroness Platt of Writtle: Because
it is vital for your shop floor workers.
Mr Franklin: Yes. Also what you do get is that
companies like Nissan will undergo through the in-house training
on specifics and if something comes to the fore that will be subject
to some sort of internal training. It is a good question and what
tends to happen, particularly on plastics, is that we have got
the British Plastics Federation and they have an ELV group meeting
where we talk about plastics and the recyclability of plastics,
what we are doing with PVC, and this knowledge does disseminate
out because all parties there are talking about it and then it
goes back into the companies to see what can be done. The PRoVE
project, which we mention in our evidence, was a good example
of that and in fact Nissan did produce quite a few components
from recycled plastics. From that, knowledge spreads out, but
I take your point about training councils and they are aware and
I could probably supply that evidence to you after the meeting.
Chairman: There is a passing reference to the
Academy; perhaps we could hear a little bit more about that as
well because that is one of the means whereby people are getting
trained or up-skilled, if I can use that expression. Lord Methuen.
Q689 Lord Methuen: Have Volkswagen
and Nissan taken high-level strategic decisions to reduce waste
and, if so, what strategies have you implemented within your factories
to do this?
Mr Stokes: Yes, it is absolutely fundamental
now that we do that on a number of fronts. There are the obvious
ones in terms of cost savings and in terms of not using excess
materials, throwing materials away, so you have a reduction in
cost and you have a reduced waste cost. If you can process those
materials into components and into vehicles using less energy
you have savings there and so there are pretty important drivers
to do that. Latterly, our customers are becoming far more aware
in terms of how vehicles are actually produced, not just what
comes out of the pump in terms of fuel consumption, but they are
now looking for us to provide information about how you minimise
those things. We produce, as do most manufacturers now, sustainability
reports and energy reports which detail the material usages and
energy costs and energy use for the vehicles that we produce.
If it is of any use we are happy to supply one of those to the
Committee.
Q690 Lord Methuen: Am I right in
thinking that when you are recycling plastic materials you tend
to use these for what I would call "non-cosmetically sensitive
things", i.e. the bits under the bonnet where they cannot
be seen in general rather than the dashboard which is part of
your high profile?
Mr Stokes: Generally speaking that is the case
because the material does degrade and as you use it multiple times
then it makes sense to use it in an area where it is not going
to be visually effective but where it can still perform a useful
function.
Mr Hardcastle: In Nissan we have about 50 applications
of recycled plastic using ten different material grades. We use
them on the door trim, as I mentioned, polypropylene, and we would
like to introduce more recycled parts onto that, but one of the
problems with recycled plastic is we do not know what colour it
is going to come out, so when we paint it all we try and colour
match it but the base colour is different, so actually the customer
would notice because the recycled plastic would be a slightly
darker shade or lighter shade, so there is a cosmetic reason why
we cannot do it from the customer point of view. Clearly, we do
like to use recycled plastic because currently it is about half
the price of virgin polypropylene, and the reason for that is
the high oil price currently. Therefore we want to use recycled
plastic in as many places as we can, so it is in our interests
to develop the properties so that they can be used. One is colour-matching
and another one is the way that the plastic fractures in a crash
scenario. If the plastic part is covering an airbag, when the
airbag fires we need a consistent deployment of the airbag which
means we need to know exactly what the plastic will do. We can
only do that with virgin material at the moment but virgin material
costs twice as much as recycled plastic so we would like to develop
recycled plastic with a similar consistency. Again, it is that
cost demand that is driving this.
Q691 Earl of Selborne: In the helpful
written evidence from the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders
there is a reference to the process to determine the key features
required for a new vehicle programme. You say "an important
consideration ... is the production cost and weight of the final
vehicle. It follows that every component design will undergo an
evaluation which will include manufacturing and material efficiency
before sign off for prototype production." What would such
evaluations entail and what information would you expect to be
produced?
Mr Franklin: The way these engineering departments
work is you tend to have a component engineer and he will be looking
after a set of components and he will always have some criteria
that those components need to meet. He will have some history,
some previous warranty on that component, a cost target, a weight
target, and then they will look at things like a teardown of a
previous part, maybe a teardown of competitors' parts, they will
look at the number of cycles that it can perform, so it will be
tested to the number of cycles before failure, they will do an
FMEA—a failure mode and effect analysis—on it to find
out why it failed,—what they could do to change it and to
alter that failure, there will be a salt bath corrosion test on
it, there will be an environmental test in terms of temperature
from minus 20 to plus 40, all that sort of information, and then
there will be a loop that says is that the right material, is
this the best that we can do with this component, and we will
go back to that, so you will get a whole mass of information about
that specific component. Obviously it will differ from component
to component but there will be, basically, a sheet that needs
to be filled in with that information.
Q692 Earl of Selborne: I think it
was Mr Stokes who referred earlier to year on year efficiencies,
which is clearly what you are striving for, but would all sectors
of the industry use the same measurement of material efficiency?
Mr Stokes: That is a good question. We have
the international IMDS, the international materials database system,
which yields a level of consistency at least across the materials
which are specified. I did not mean to infer that year on year
improvements would be made, it is normally from one model cycle
to model cycle that improvements would be made. Generally speaking
although cars are large they have not increased in weight as much
as they could have so we would not want you to think that year
on year we are making improvements but it is more about the model
cycle.
Q693 Chairman: How long is the model
cycle?
Mr Stokes: It varies from manufacturer to manufacturer,
but six to seven years, but within that there will be small changes
in terms of trim level changes or specifications that take place.
Mr Hardcastle: The upper body cycle might be
six years, but we would try and get ten years or more from the
chassis and the power train. The customer at the moment is demanding
to change the body shape but not necessarily change the power
train or the under-body parts of the car.
Q694 Lord Howie of Troon: It occurs
to me, My Lord Chairman, that I could declare a peripheral interest
because pre-history, in the Sixties, I was the Member of Parliament
for Luton which at that time was quite well-known for its heavy
car industry but any information that I had back then would be
well out of date now. It is clear from the conversation that you
have done quite a bit to increase the use of recycled materials.
Can you tell me what percentage of metal and non-metal parts is
made from virgin raw materials?
Mr Stokes: In a word probably no.
Q695 Lord Howie of Troon: There must
be some variation.
Mr Stokes: There is, and if we take metal as
an example, most metal is recovered and recycled whether it is
from cars or washing machines or other products and from structural
metal. This is then sold out onto the open market and it is from
the open market that we purchase, so how much of that is actually
recyclate and how much is virgin material is very difficult to
actually pin down as far as I am aware because we are just purchasing
from the pool of material that is available.
Q696 Lord Howie of Troon: Could you
make a guess?
Mr Hardcastle: As Peter said, certainly for
steel and aluminium basically we buy it to a specification and
then that supplier governs the recycle arrangements, so as long
as it has certain material properties we will buy it. We understand
that of the materials we are buying in Nissan, steel is about
five to ten per cent recycled so 90 per cent of it is probably
virgin, but on aluminium about 45 to 55 per cent is recycled.
Q697 Baroness Platt of Writtle: But
aluminium is infinitely recyclable, is it not?
Mr Hardcastle: Yes, and the process of taking
aluminium from ore is a lot more difficult than taking it from
scrap.
Q698 Baroness Platt of Writtle: I
was rather surprised that aluminium was not mentioned much, because
it makes for a lighter car, does it not? You say in your evidence
that most of the carbon footprint is during the life of a car,
so aluminium ought really to be lighter and better and recyclable.
Mr Franklin: There has been an interesting debate
in the industry; as you can imagine, the steel industry responded
very strongly to the fact that people were moving over to aluminium
bodies and they did an ULSAB programme—ultra light steel
automotive body—which then introduced one of the things
like tailor-welded blanks, which meant that you did not have to
put reinforcements in, so that an inner door which would have
had a reinforcement in it now had a thicker piece of material
laser-welded into it and then pressed to try and compete with
and get to the same sort of position that aluminium was offering.
You are absolutely right, Audi and the Volkswagen Group have got
aluminium vehicles and there is a different structure, the way
they are assembled is different, but there are definite advantages.
Seat frames tend to be magnesium now—there are more aluminium
components in the vehicle, but not necessarily going to a whole
aluminium body.
Q699 Lord Howie of Troon: You cannot
control this, can you, except through the pricing system, it is
left to the supplier as to whether it is virgin or recycled.
Mr Hardcastle: For us in Nissan, for steel and
aluminium, we leave it to the supplier but for plastics, particularly
polypropylene, then for the reason I mentioned earlier we would
demand recycled material because it is cheaper. We use about 50
kilograms of recycled plastic on a Qashqai, the latest Nissan
to be launched, which means we are generating about 12,000 tonnes
of demand a year for recycled plastic.
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