The Secret of the Yoga Club: The Women's Identity is Not Simple

As the door opened, a blast of air mixed with the smells of engine oil, welding fumes, and rubber hit us.

The noise inside the workshop was much higher than outside. The sounds of the conveyor belt running, the intermittent impact of the pneumatic wrench, the muffled clatter of metal parts colliding, and the occasional dispatch instructions from the overhead broadcast system were all mixed together.

Lin Feng stood at the entrance and spent about ten seconds scanning the layout of the entire workshop.

The workshop has a large span, with a steel structure frame supporting a space nearly three stories high. Dense lighting tubes are arranged on the ceiling, illuminating the entire work area without any shadows or blind spots.

The ground is painted with gray-green epoxy flooring, and yellow lines demarcate material storage areas, AGV (Automated Guided Vehicle) driving lanes, and green lanes for personnel passage. A dozen orange robotic arms are lined up along the main line, completing their respective assembly tasks in turn.

Each robotic arm moves in a compact and precise manner, with almost no pauses in between.

"This is our commercial vehicle assembly line. The main line is currently producing new energy heavy trucks for export to Europe, and the right side produces light and medium trucks for export to Southeast Asia." Lu Jianguo stood next to Lin Feng, pointing to the main corridor of the production line. "This line just completed its third round of flexible transformation last year. Now it can produce four different vehicle platforms in mixed flow on the same main line, and the changeover time has been reduced to less than twelve minutes."

Lin Feng raised an eyebrow slightly.

Twelve minutes—this is almost twice as fast as the model changeover time of several domestic commercial vehicle manufacturers.

Vice President Zhang had obviously noticed the number as well. He flipped open his notebook, made a note of it, and whispered something to the technical backbone next to him.

The key technical staff member's surname is Zhou, and his name is Zhou Mancang. He was poached by Shuke from a foreign-funded auto parts company. He has been working in manufacturing engineering for more than ten years and is very sensitive to this kind of production line data.

After listening to Vice President Zhang's words, he pushed up his glasses, stared at the operating production line, and moved his gaze back and forth between several key workstations, as if he was silently calculating something in his mind.

Lu Jianguo led them along the green corridor, stopping at each workstation to explain a few points. His explanation style was very practical; he avoided abstract concepts and went straight to the process, parameters, cost, and efficiency.

He stopped at the chassis assembly station and pointed to a huge clamp overhead. It looked like an inverted metal frame covered with locating pins and clamping arms.

"This workstation positions and clamps the longitudinal beams, crossbeams, and reinforcing plates of the chassis in one go, and then ten robots weld them simultaneously. The welding time for the entire weld is 180 seconds, which is almost four times faster than manual welding. Moreover, the consistency of the weld is much better than that of humans."

Zhou Mancang couldn't help but ask, "Minister Lu, how do you control welding deformation? Such a large frame has a considerable amount of heat input."

Lu Jianguo turned to look at him, smiled, and his smile carried a hint of "you've hit the nail on the head." "Engineer Zhou's question is very professional. We added an online inspection station before and after welding, using lasers to scan the geometric dimensions of the weld and providing real-time feedback to the welding robot for parameter compensation. In addition, there is a straightening process after welding, using a hydraulic servo straightening machine, which can control the accuracy within 0.5 millimeters."

Zhou Mancang nodded and quickly jotted down a few lines in his notebook.

Continuing forward, we passed the wiring harness assembly area, the pipe connection area, the cab hoisting station, and the chassis bolt tightening station. The pace at each station was fast, but busy yet orderly.

Lin Feng noticed a detail: at intervals along both sides of the production line, there was an electronic display board that showed the planned output for the shift, the actual output, the first pass rate, and workstation abnormality alarm information in real time.

On a signboard, the pass rate was displayed as 98.7%, a number that Lin Feng silently memorized.

When Lu Jianguo arrived at the battery pack assembly station, he paused for a noticeably longer time. This station was separated by a transparent protective panel, and inside were two operators wearing anti-static suits and a six-axis robot, installing modules and connecting copper busbars into the battery pack casing.

A process flow chart is pasted on the outside of the protective panel, with quality control points for each step densely marked on it.

"This is the PACK assembly station for the second-generation blade battery," Lu Jianguo raised his voice slightly to drown out the surrounding noise. "From the cell to the module to the PACK, there's a three-layer protective structure, and the entire pack has passed four certifications: extrusion, overcharge, thermal runaway, and salt spray corrosion. We use the same battery pack design in the models we export to Europe; we haven't differentiated it for different markets to reduce costs."

The last sentence made Lin Feng glance at him again.

The lack of differentiated cost reduction means that export and domestic models use the same standards. This is uncommon in the industry; many companies simplify materials or processes in their domestic versions to cut costs. BYD's choice of a unified standard is a declaration of its control over its quality control system.

After leaving the final assembly workshop, Lu Jianguo did not arrange a rest time for them. Instead, he led them directly through a connecting corridor into the adjacent testing workshop for the three electrical systems.

This workshop is completely different from the final assembly workshop. It is much quieter and the lighting is dimmer. The workstations are separated by dark partitions, and each workstation has several testing devices with various connectors. The data on the screen is being refreshed rapidly.

There was no smell of machine oil in the air; instead, there was a smell unique to electronic equipment workshops, similar to that of newly unpacked circuit boards.

"Every car that rolls off the assembly line has to go into this workshop for insulation testing, battery charge and discharge testing, motor bench testing, and joint debugging and testing of the vehicle's communication protocol," Lu Jianguo explained as he led them along the testing line. "The test data is simultaneously uploaded to the cloud-based quality traceability system. Every test result for every car can be traced back to the corresponding workstation, operator, equipment number, and material batch. We've been using this system since 2019, and the accumulated data now amounts to tens of millions of records."

Lin Feng stood next to a heavy truck that was undergoing motor bench testing, looking at a string of numbers jumping on the screen—peak power, rated power, speed fluctuation, temperature rise curve, each of which fluctuated slightly within the normal range.

He glanced at Zhou Mancang, who was staring at the screen with the focused and restrained excitement typical of a technician when they see something good.

"President Lin," Zhou Mancang said in a low voice, "this testing system can't be bought with money. It takes several years of mass production data to calibrate the thresholds so accurately."

Lin Feng nodded without saying anything.

It was almost 1 p.m. when I came out of the testing workshop.

Lu Jianguo glanced at his watch and smiled apologetically, "Sorry, I got a little carried away and lost track of time. Let's grab a quick bite first, and then we can continue our tour of the painting workshop and R&D center this afternoon."

Lunch was arranged in the reception restaurant inside the factory area, and the food was quite good. Lu Jianguo did not talk about business during the meal, but talked about some industry trends, such as the impact of the EU's latest carbon border adjustment mechanism on the export of new energy vehicles, the industrialization timetable of solid-state batteries, and the progress of charging infrastructure construction in several Southeast Asian countries.

Lin Feng ate while listening, occasionally interjecting a few words.

He discovered that Lu Jianguo had a unique characteristic: he wasn't just a business executive who could recite PowerPoint presentations. He had a deep understanding of the entire industry chain and could discuss a topic from the perspectives of policy, technology, cost, and market.

These kinds of people are difficult to deal with, but working with them at least prevents you from getting tripped up by some trivial issues.