Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is reverberating through the global car industry, with the strongest effects on European carmakers who have relied on Ukrainian factories to produce components for their cars according to a recent article in PlasticsToday and its sister magazine Design News. It turns out that wiring harnesses are pretty labor-intensive to put together and Ukraine is one of the most cost-effective countries globally for such tasks.
SEBN, a major wiring harness manufacturer, describes the parameters of its wiring harnesses for the Volkswagen Golf and Audi Q7 on its web site. The Golf’s harness weighs between 27 and 55 lbs., while it weighs as much as 100 lbs. in a Q7. It includes about 600 individual wires in the Golf and nearly double that for the Q7. Plugging them in requires 150 connectors for the Golf and 250 for the Audi. Total length of the Golf’s wiring stretches more than 3,200 feet and the Q7 carries nearly 10,000 feet of wiring.
A wiring assembly station at a Draexlmeier plant in Tunisia illustrates the complexity of manufacturing wiring harnesses for modern vehicles. Image: Alamy
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