Tuam factory Valeo gears up for car camera production boom

Valeo Vision Systems this week celebrated its 100 millionth ‘automotive nearfield camera’ – which give rear and bird’s eye vision for drivers – rolling off the production line.

Announcing the milestone, Marc Vrecko, President of Valeo’s Comfort and Driving Assistance Systems Business Group, had some good news for the plant based at the Industrial Development Agency Business Park on the Dunmore Road.

“Things are about to move up another gear. We now plan to produce more than 20 million cameras a year and globally deliver as many units to our automaker customers in the next four years as we did in the last 15, meaning another 100 million cameras by 2026,” he told the Connacht Tribune.

It is a remarkable achievement for the company, which set up as Connaught Electronics Ltd in 1982 with a handful of employees. There are now 850 employees, nearly 70 per cent of them engineers with coding expertise.

Its reputation for the development and manufacture of electronic components mainly in the field of camera applications for driver assistance and radio frequency applications for remote vehicle access and security caught the attention of the French multinational Valeo which bought it in 2007.

Listed on the Paris stock exchange, the Valeo group employs 113,600 people in 33 countries worldwide. It has 186 production plants, 59 Research and Development (R&D) centres and 15 distribution platforms.

“When Valeo acquired this start-up, this was one of the promises made to the founders: to say this business has been Irish and will remain very, very strongly in Ireland and over the years we’ve been more than blessed by the enthusiasm, the passion and dedication of the team here.

“It’s been a fantastic and very rare success. We feel so happy to be here.”

From its Tuam plant, Valeo was the first to market in Europe with the reversing camera. Last year an unnamed car manufacturer released its ‘bird’s eye’ or 360-degree camera boasting image fusion technology, which creates a single snapshot from multiple video sources. It feels as if the driver is being assisted by a drone above the car.

The company’s R&D unit in Galway developed the nifty feature already in some high-end cars that allows drivers to automatically manoeuvre their car into a parking space. It was behind a wide-angle camera that can generate cross-traffic alerts, improve views at junctions and help drivers to detect pedestrians and assist motorists towing trailers.

“Every single advanced feature and function and technology has been developed and engineered in this place so it’s really a very, very important place for Valeo,” remarked Mr Vrecko.

“In Tuam we have a global R&D centre for advanced cameras, so it’s where we’re piloting, steering most of our projects. Every new camera and every generation of camera is first primarily developed and manufactured in this plant. Tuam is the mother plant, it’s going to groom the new technologies.”

In 2019 the company announced an investment of €44m in the R&D programme to build on its capability in Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS), which will be pivotal to autonomous or self-driving vehicles.

Products developed by the Tuam R&D centre are also in production at Valeo sites in Germany, Hungary, Mexico and China.

The first camera rolled off the Irish production lines in 2002. Eight years later, one million units were delivered to customers. In 2013, the ten-millionth camera threshold was hit, and in 2015, the figure doubled to 20 million. Between 2015 and 2018, output increased 30-fold compared with the first eight years, with 30 million cameras manufactured in three years, for a total of 50 million. The four years between 2018 and 2022 saw total production double and cross the 100 million camera mark. Mr Vrecko explains that this huge ramping up in production is down to the mass production of high-tech systems, a revolution in safety and comfort and artificial intelligence algorithms, allowing Valeo to create through-the-body vision, autonomous parking and driving features.

Valeo now equips one in three new cars globally with its technology and number one in the world in advanced driving assistance systems (ADAS) that use sensor technologies like radar and lidar to detect objects.

The French manager believes that 90 per cent of cars will have some form of driving assistance by 2030.

“Of course, we aim to bring that technology to the masses. We are enthusiastic about the possibilities, to make sure it’s affordable and in use for everyone. Our aim is to have more and more users.”

Finding and retaining staff to continue that expansion will be crucial to Tuam’s continued success, he agrees. The plant already boasts 35 nationalities.

“It’s very hard to find talent in the technology space. It’s very competitive. It is a tough fight to get the best people in the high-tech space. You need to provide the best and most exciting opportunities. But we have a super exciting product. There is a true sense of fulfillment when you see products on actual cars.

“We have a real community life here. We have a way of bringing together all the people. In the last ten years I’ve been here every six months so I know it pretty well and the Tuam team are very rooted here. They are very happy.  It’s unique for a multinational.”

(hotograph by Aengus McMahon: Mary Buckley, Executive Director, IDA Ireland with Christophe Périllat, Chief Executive Officer of Valeo pictured at the company's Tuam site as their 100 millionth camera came off the production line).