Truck Manufacturing: From Riveted Frames to ABB Robots

Truck manufacturing sits somewhere between car making and heavy engineering. A heavy truck has a long steel ladder frame, a cab that is welded and painted much like a car body, and a huge number of variants, because almost every fleet orders its own mix of wheelbase, axles and cab. This post follows truck building from the first motor lorries and hand-riveted frames to frame lines, robot welded cabs and the electric truck plants opening in 2026. It also looks at where ABB robots such as the IRB 6700 and the IRB 5500 paint robot fit, and at what still holds automation back.

A battery electric Tesla Semi hauling a PepsiCo trailer on a California highway, 2023. Photo: Dllu / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

How early trucks were riveted together

The motor truck is almost as old as the car. Gottlieb Daimler's company built one of the first in 1896, a lorry with a small petrol engine, and by 1898 Daimler trucks were going to customers such as a candle factory in Stockholm. These early machines were built the way carriages and steam wagons were. A wooden or steel frame sat on solid wheels, and a few skilled smiths and fitters shaped, drilled and riveted each part by hand.

A Daimler motor lorry of 1898, one of the first motor trucks, in the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart. Photo: Martin Dürrschnabel / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)

Purpose built trucks followed quickly. The Mack brothers started building buses and trucks in Brooklyn and later moved to Allentown, Pennsylvania, where their AC model of 1916, nicknamed the Bulldog, became one of the best known heavy trucks of its day. Volvo built its first truck, the LV series, in Sweden in 1928. Frames were steel channel rails joined by crossmembers with hot rivets, and gangs of workers heated, set and hammered every one of them.

A Mack AC Bulldog truck at the America on Wheels museum in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Photo: Klaus Nahr / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

After the Second World War truck plants adopted moving assembly lines, but frames stayed labour intensive. A 1958 photo from the Teijo ironworks in Finland, where Volvo trucks and buses were assembled, shows bare frames on stands down the length of a hall with workers moving among them. Over the following decades presses, frame punching machines and bolted joints replaced much of the riveting. Cabs moved from wood and canvas to pressed steel shells, which had to be welded and painted.

Truck and bus frames on stands at the Teijo ironworks in Mathildedal, Finland, where Volvo vehicles were assembled, 1958. Photo: Bror Brandt / Finnish Heritage Agency via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

Robot welded cabs and electric truck lines

Steel cabs are welded and painted much like car bodies, so cab shops are where truck plants use robots most heavily today. China Daily reported on 22 September 2026 that Dongfeng Commercial Vehicle's D600 plant in Shiyan, which began production in January, has 227 robots on its welding line and finishes a high end truck cab about every 87 seconds. Welding and painting there are fully automated, and the company says production is about 40 percent more efficient than on traditional lines. The plant cost more than 1.2 billion yuan, can build over 260,000 vehicle bodies a year and runs a laser welding line for cab roofs.

ABB robots in the body shop at BAIC's electric vehicle plant in China. Photo: ABB

Electric trucks are bringing new factories with them. Tesla started high volume production of its Semi on 24 September 2026 in a dedicated 1.8 million square foot plant next to Gigafactory Nevada, which it says can build 50,000 trucks a year. The first truck came off that line in April. Tesla says it stamps parts and builds the batteries, drive axles and seats in-house, and it claims the first powder coated Class 8 truck. Daimler Truck has also announced a new US assembly plant. Final assembly is another matter: a 2011 photo of the Unimog line at Mercedes-Benz in Wörth shows people building the truck by hand as it moves down the line.

An orange Unimog U400 on the assembly line at the Mercedes-Benz plant in Wörth, Germany, 2011. Photo: Klaus Nahr / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The reports above do not say whose robots these plants use, but ABB makes robots for most of these jobs. The IRB 6700 can carry a heavy spot welding gun around a cab or lift frame parts and axles, and ABB arc welding robots can join brackets and crossmembers. In the paint shop, IRB 5500 paint robots are built to work in explosive booth air and can reach the large surfaces of a truck cab. Our post on spot welding robots explains how a body shop line works.

ABB paint robots working on a car body inside a paint booth. Photo: ABB

What comes next for truck plants

Frames look like the next big job for robots. A heavy truck frame rail can be several metres long, and each one needs its own hole pattern for the customer's axles, tanks and bodies. CNC machines already punch or drill those holes in many plants, so robots that handle the long rails, fit crossmembers and tighten fasteners would be the next step. Electric trucks add battery packs that have to be lifted and bolted into the frame with care, a good job for large arms with force control.

A sideloader forklift carrying long truck frame rails at the Renault Trucks plant in Bourg-en-Bresse, France, 2008. Photo: Manuguf / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Cost and flexibility are the open problems. A cab line like Dongfeng's needs high volume to pay off, while truck makers sell each model in a huge number of combinations. Every new robot cell needs fixtures that can take many variants, and that means a lot of programming. Plants use offline tools such as RobotStudio to build and test robot paths on a digital model before a new cab or frame variant reaches the line.

An ABB IRB 6700 lifting a large panel at dhp technology, the kind of load a cab part or frame member puts on a robot. Photo: ABB

People and skills set the limit. Trucks are big, heavy and built in small batches, so final assembly will stay largely manual for some time, and plants will need technicians who can program robots and understand trucks. Robots also work at the other end of a truck's life on the road, loading and unloading it, which our post on truck unloading robots covers. For truck buyers, more automation in the plant should mean more consistent welds and paint, and perhaps shorter waits for custom orders. Cleaner paint shops are part of the same change: Dongfeng's move to water based paints cut its volatile organic compound emissions by about half.

New Mercedes-Benz trucks lined up outside the Daimler plant in Wörth, Germany, 2014. Photo: HeinzWörth / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

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