Entering the 500,000 square meters that the Ebro Factory plant in Barcelona occupies is, in large part, a visit to the origins of the brand and its deep connection with the Catalan capital. The same naves and corridors that In 1967 they saw the last Ebro vehicles leave to become later at Nissan Motor Ibérica.
In 2026, the factory that opened its doors in the Barcelona Free Trade Zone almost 70 years ago, manufactures vehicles again (and not just assembly) with the Ebro logo on its grille.
Ebro has just opened its facilities to the press for the first time, and we have been able to see first-hand what it is like to manufacture a car. What we have found is a factory full of welding robots, automated parts supply lines and state-of-the-art assembly lines that They look more to the future than to the past.
A plant with many stories
The old Nissan factory closed on December 31, 2021 after 41 years of activity. The cessation of activity left some 2,500 workers on the streets. Three years later, Ebro confirmed his reindustrialization plan of the plant returning its activity. And he did it, to a large extent, with the same workers he had.
Of the almost 2,000 employees that the company currently has, nearly 1,000 employees who work here today They were already with Nissan. Of them, about 400 are product engineers, 200 process engineers and 200 welding and assembly line specialists. These employees know every hallway, every corner and, according to those responsible for the factory, they have played a leading role in the start-up of the plant.
The factory occupies 500,000 m2
Our guide throughout the visit was Paco DuranDirector of Production Control and Logistics. According to what he said, he himself started at this same plant in 1998, when the Nissan sign still hung on the door. When the Japanese stopped production he spent some time at Stellantis. When Ebro started his reindustrialization plan, he returned to what he considered his Alma mater.
Durán is, in all likelihood, the person who best knows how these facilities work. Nissan veterans like him helped design each booth of the new assembly line based on the years of experience that the assembly of Japanese cars gave them. They knew exactly what had worked before and what had failed.
That muscle memory acquired by years of automobile production has weighed more than any manual and has contributed to the Ebro Factory will start walking in record time. First as an assembly center, and now as the only Ebro manufacturing plant in Spain and Europe, in which the Spanish brand already manufactures four models with welding, painting, assembly and quality control processes.
Barcelona outside and inside
There is a very curious detail in how this factory is designed. It is inspired by Barcelona and the two rivers (the Besós and the Llobregat) that frame it. Being called Ebro, it makes sense.
Like these rivers, the entire flow of supplies flows from mountains to sea. It is not the only inspiration that Ebro engineers have borrowed from Barcelona when designing it.
The interior of the factory has the same structure as the streets of Barcelona
Its interior is arranged in streets perpendicular to each other, well-defined islands, without intersections that block the passage or flows that collide with each other. The reference is the Cerdà Plan of 1859who created the orthogonal grid so characteristic of Barcelona that it ordered the Eixample of Barcelona. An urban model that is still a reference in half the world. A small Barcelona within an icon of Barcelona’s industrial past.
Under this spatial arrangement, the materials enter at one end of the factory and advance in line to the other, without setbacks or countercurrents. As Durán explained, this flow “towards the sea” reduces errors, improves response times and, as an added advantage, facilitates the evacuation of the plant in case of emergency.
The plant works on two levels. All the assembly of the different components occurs on the ground, while the automatic transports of parts and bodies circulate suspended in a complex logistics system that takes the bodies from one section to another without interrupting the assembly work below.
To give us an idea of the magnitude of this aerial infrastructure, the equivalent of three days of production of components and bodies was circulating above our heads at all times.
696 meters of line and 20 cars per hour
Since November 2024, the factory operated with the M0 assembly line, in which the cars arrived from China semi-assembled and the rest of the parts were assembled at the Ebro factory.
However, the heart of the visit, and the new jewel in Ebro’s crown, is the M1 assembly line. There are 696 meters, 97 work stations and a cycle of 160 seconds per vehicle. That is, each operator has that time to assemble the elements assigned to that station.
The body is welded in a 23,000 square meter warehouse with more than 150 robots. Around 95% of this process is fully automated. There the floor, sides and roof are welded until forming what is called the Body-in-Whitethe empty structure of the car before receiving any paint or components.
From there it travels by air to the painting area which, for safety reasons due to the chemical agents used there, we were not able to visit (we needed PPE and additional protection). In this section, the car chassis go through degreasing baths, paint is applied through cataphoresis and an anti-corrosion treatment. Afterwards, the already painted bodies fly back to the assembly area, but not before disassembling the doors, which travel in parallel, to improve the workers’ access to the interior.
Something that caught my attention was that all the cars I saw on the assembly line were Ebro S700 red in color (the Red Blood Stone, to be more exact). When we asked Paco Durán about the reason, he explained to us that instead of responding to color requests according to the order in which they arrived, an estimate was made and they were grouped by color lots.
In this way, a certain batch of red, black or white cars were painted and assembled according to demand, saving paint in the process and optimizing production continuity.
Thirty-seven assembly stations welcome the bodies, already on the ground, organized in pairs to the left and right. The operators dress them with their dashboard, their airbags and their sensors. At the end of the process, the doors return to the car.
Each unit has more than a thousand different parts and components associated with it. A logistics system just-in-time fully automated is responsible for taking the parts to the supply warehouses, where a human team is in charge of filling shelves with the parts assigned to each unit based on their finishes. This part of the system draws on the sources of Amazon’s order preparation system where a system monitors the content of each tray to guarantee that the operator has not placed pieces that do not correspond.
Then, an army of robots is responsible for delivering the batch of parts to the assembly line. At that point, it is placed next to the assigned unit to follow it like a shadow until the operators have assembled all the components. At that point, the autonomous robot returns the shelf to the supply section to start the cycle again.
At that rate they come out 250 cars a day in a single shift. Julio González, Director of Operations (COO) of Ebro, assured that they can be expanded to two or three shifts if demand demands it and even open new assembly lines if demand grows and new models arrive.
Rafael Ruiz, president of EV Ebro, explained that the M1 line is designed to manufacture up to five different models without major adjustments and its flexibility would allow the production of Chery models that share a platform with Ebro’s cars. That is, it is prepared not only to assume 100% of the production of its cars, but it could also serve as a center of local production for its Chinese shareholderwho would become your client.
Autonomous robots carrying components to the assembly line
33,000 cars and the investment that follows
Ebro now exceeds 33,000 vehicles produced since it started in November 2024, of which, around 16,000 have been produced so far in 2026. The accumulated investment in this Ebro reindustrialization process is around 150 million euros, with 70 million allocated only to the bodywork plant, of which 80% has been carried out with local suppliers. That is, it is an investment that stays in the territory.
In addition to the almost 2,000 direct employees of the plant, Ebro facilitates some 4,000 indirect jobs in the ecosystem of local and national suppliers that provide parts for its cars. A good part of these suppliers were already Nissan suppliers, so Ebro has recovered a good part of that industrial fabric.
Rafael Ruiz insists on Ebro’s close link with the territory, “it is a company based in our country, with capital from our country, with a technological partner who is Chery, but the company is Spanish, it is from here, it manufactures here and has a product that generates employment and added value in our country.”
There is another investment of 100 million euros planned until 2029 to modernize the painting section and abandon solvents in favor of water-based technology.
The company, which listed on BME Growth with Spanish capital, has as its technological partner Chinese manufacturer Chery. Chery owns 40% of the industrial joint venture that they formed with Ebro. That is, the platform and design of the cars are Chinese, but the production engineering, labor and industrial management is Spanish.
By the end of 2026 the M1 line should reach cruising speed with a capacity of 50,000 vehicles per year. By 2027, it is expected that the the brand’s first pure electric. An urban compact based on the Chery QQ3 EV that will be manufactured here taking advantage of the flexibility of the recently inaugurated assembly line.
Image | Unsplash (Logan Armstrong), Ebro, Xataka
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