THE MDI PRODUCTION CONCEPT

The MDI business model is based around distributed, non-centralised manufacturing plants. This model demonstrates clearly the economic, social and environmental advantages of decentralised manufacturing . There are increasing recognised advantages to move away from centralisation towards locally manufactured products. AVL’s initial plant will be a showcase to other parties around the globe of an efficient, sustainable, environmentally sound business model.

MDI has imagined, created and developed an industrialisation concept to manufacture its products in a way that is coherent, ecological and economic.

“AN INNOVATIVE PRODUCTION METHODOLOGY…”
TO THINK GLOBALLY AND ACT LOCALLY

MANUFACTURE AT POINT OF SALE

By selling turn-key factories to manufacture and sell its cars locally, MDI offers for the first time the concept of Dealer/Manufacturer/Partner. Unlike the huge conventional assembly plants (particularly polluting), the MDI concept multiplies the number of locally producing micro-factories, scattered throughout the world. These local factories will manufacture up to 80% of the vehicle and sell the vehicles locally and directly out of the factory. In addition, this allows the more even distribution of overall factory energy requirements to be spread over a number of smaller factories, the elimination of delivery costs, distribution costs and downstream sales and storage costs as well as the creation of local jobs.

The R & D Factory at Carros, in France

At Carros, within MDI’s R & D work of setting up the first production line of AirPods has begun. This pilot unit includes everything you need to manufacture vehicles as they will be duplicated in each factory deployed on the concept of MDI production departments. Fully realized by our research department, the design of the production line with the thinking of our group either in terms of reducing emissions from the manufacture of our products or in terms of costs. The integration of functions and the concept of “just enough” methods have been systematically applied.

The strong MDI production concept reduces the cost of manufacture by avoiding expenditure resulting from the logistics and parallel costs engendered by large volume production.
In the framework of the MDI production concept, suppliers of material and product for the manufacturing plants are chosen so as to reduce the costs, logistics and transport. All purchases are managed through the purchasing centre of MDI and thus all manufacturing plants and customers benefit from the price practices for mass production.
In a general way, by comparing the typical production system and the MDI concept (taking as a basis the same number of vehicles), the result is:
1/3 of the land surface for the typical production system is necessary
1/4 of the surface built of an conventional assembly plant
1/5 of the investment
30% more employees

IMPLEMENTATION OF THE MDI MODEL

Each zone is defined so that the annual production of the plant is absorbed by its specific market. The parameters taken into account are the following:
The current market for the area (brand new and second hand)
The potential market for MDI (approximately 1%)
The GDP of the country
Number of people in urban areas
A separate body representing all the licencees, coordinates and manages the relationships between the different “dealers/ manufacturers/partner” of each country. The purchasing centre of MDI negotiates directly with suppliers for the orders of all plants, in order to benefit from volume effect.

As determined by the MDI population based distributed manufacturing model Air Volution anticipates that up to six geographically located factories will be required to produce the range of MDI transport vehicles within the Company’s licence area of Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific regions.

The systems computer designs for machining will be provided from the MDI head plant. The Master moulds will come from MDI to make the chassis, doors, roofs, seats etc. The CNC machines will come from the HASS machine manufacturers. MDI will provide the programming and systems for operation and machining. The layout and plant set up will be MDI based. These may require minor alterations for AVL’s region and/or regulations. Initial training is provided by MDI.