Renault’s Technocentre, opened in 1998, is one of the leading R&D facilities in Europe for new vehicle development. Within the buildings of the 370-acre site, activities taking place design and development of vehicles, engines, and gearboxes for Groupe Renault and the Alliance.
The facility is off-limits to all but authorised Renault personnel, with secrecy strictly enforced. This is especially so at the Global Production Engineering Centre, a unique, secret and high-tech miniature factory. Renault is one of the few car manufacturers to operate a specific prototype facility where the assembly methods and processes are representative of automotive production lines.
By replicating the manufacturing process, the centre aims to produce prototypes that accurately represent future production models to validate the industrial assembly process, naturally keeping pace with development phases. This also allows the personnel from various departments to examine and optimise the many processes of making a car, reducing problems when full-scale production gets underway.
For some time now, the facility has been working with the all-electric Renault 5, which will eventually be put into mass production at the Douai plant in northern France. The prototypes – numbering more than 60 – have been produced at the Prototype Build Centre since October 2021. Built on the new pure electric CMF-B EV platform, these cars are technically representative of the future production version.
Known as ‘mules’, they have been used for various purposes such as cold-weather testing in northern Scandinavia as well as other tests. The ‘vehicle check’’ prototypes, which are true to the design of the future production version, are camouflaged so they can be driven on European roads to allow testing in real-world conditions.
Carefully developed processes, tools and parts enable the engineering teams to focus primarily on production ramp-up, facilitated by plant operators trained by Renault’s Global Production Engineering Centre experts.
The prototyping phase acts as a bridge between product design and large-scale production, providing an opportunity to turn preliminary hypotheses and numerical data into tangible solutions that can be tested and validated. All software, connectors and electronics are also tested. The ultimate aim is to identify and eliminate any issues in every area so that the Renault 5 EV that is delivered to showrooms will have the highest quality possible.
