Mercedes-Benz Vans opened its expanded Sprinter plant in Ladson on Wednesday, and Amazon used the occasion to say it has ordered 20,000 of the vans built there.
The roughly $500 million expansion, under construction for two years, lets the plant build the new-generation Sprinter from the ground up for the North American market, the company said. More than 900 people work at the expanded site, which the company calls its North Charleston plant, and that number is set to grow to 1,300 by the end of 2020. Suppliers are expected to create about 600 more jobs in and around North Charleston, the company estimated.
The company introduced the first U.S.-made Sprinter and delivered it to Amazon, Automotive Fleet reported.
“The USA is already the second largest market for our Sprinter today,” Volker Mornhinweg, head of Mercedes-Benz Vans, said in a statement. “With the new, state-of-the-art production site in South Carolina, we will be able to supply our customers in North America even faster and with more flexibility in the future.”
Mornhinweg described the North Charleston plant as “a central component of our growth strategy ‘Mercedes-Benz Vans goes global.’”
Amazon’s order
The Amazon-branded Sprinters are for the online retailer’s new Delivery Service Partner program. Small business owners will work with third-party fleet management companies to get customized vans and special leases that keep their startup costs low, according to Mercedes-Benz Vans. Element Fleet Management will offer the vans on commercial leases, and Mercedes-Benz will deliver them by the end of 2019, Automotive Fleet reported.
“Thanks to the tremendous response to Amazon’s new Delivery Service Partner program, we are excited to increase our original order of branded Sprinter vans to 20,000 vehicles so new small businesses will have access to a customized fleet to power deliveries of Amazon packages,” Dave Clark, Amazon’s senior vice president of worldwide operations, said in the announcement.
Amazon evaluated other full-size vans, Clark said, according to Automotive Fleet. “We found it was a great partnership, the right vehicle at the right time,” he said. “It was the right timing of the plant opening, the right vehicle, and the quality of the teams.”
Plans uncovered in August show that Amazon is also planning its own package delivery center in Ladson, WCSC Live 5 News reported.
From kits to a full factory
Since 2006, workers in North Charleston have assembled Sprinters from semi-knocked-down kits, and since 2015 they have done the same for imported Metris mid-size vans, the company said. Under that system, Mercedes-Benz built the vans in Düsseldorf, Germany, partly took them apart and shipped them through Rotterdam in the Netherlands to the Port of Charleston for reassembly, Automotive Fleet reported.
Building the vans in South Carolina lets the company avoid a 25% U.S. tariff on imported light trucks known as the “chicken tax,” the publication reported.
The company announced the full plant in March 2015. The expansion added a body shop, a paint shop and final assembly, and it tripled the site’s footprint to 222 acres, or nearly 10 million square feet, according to Mercedes-Benz Vans. Production and office buildings cover about 41 acres, or 1.8 million square feet.
Once fully operational, the plant plans to build an estimated 40,000 vans a year, Live 5 reported. It will have 182 robots, but 980 employees will be needed in manufacturing, the station reported.
Inside the plant
The new Sprinter comes in more than 1,700 variants, the company said, and each employee has to learn about 900 process steps in a specific order to build it. Assembly workers train with on-screen tools that the company compares to a computer game, and paint shop workers use virtual reality goggles and paint guns to simulate painting.
The plant uses driverless transport vehicles that can travel more than 40 miles in one shift, guided by transponders built into the factory floor, the company said. Radio-frequency identification replaces paper production records, letting workers pinpoint any component and letting quality inspectors confirm that the correct part went into the correct van.
The new Sprinter
The opening coincides with the U.S. launch of the third-generation Sprinter, Automotive Fleet reported. The 2019 model offers an optional factory telematics system, a revamped interior, the MBUX multimedia system and a 2.0-liter four-cylinder gasoline engine for U.S. buyers. The plant will also build the Freightliner-branded Sprinter.
Amazon chose a third-party telematics system instead of the Mercedes Pro system, Clark said, according to the publication.
Van equipment companies including Knapheide and Auto Truck Group have built new facilities to support the plant, Automotive Fleet reported.
With the full plant running, the company says it can serve the growing demand of North American customers more economically and significantly cut delivery times.
