IN FRONT of UK Secretary of State for Transport, the Rt Hon Patrick McLoughlin, BMW’s Oxford boss Frank Bachmann confirmed that the German parent of MINI was sticking with last year’s promise to invest £250m in over a thousand robots at Plant Oxford, where the BMW MINI is currently produced.
The confirmation came amidst the celebration of 100 years of car production at the Cowley plant, where William Morris produced his first car, a Morris Bullnose, on March 28th, 1913.
in 1968 British Leyland was the the 4th largest company in the world
It was another freezing ‘Spring’ day in Oxford, punctuated by flurries of unseasonal snow, and rounded off by a fly-over by a Tiger Moth bi-plane, one of many produced at the plant in the 1930s.
Within various speeches, there were some juicy facts that made me reflect on just how rapidly the world has moved, not so much since 1913 but since the more recently remembered past.
In 1968, for instance, British Leyland was the 4th largest company in the world. That’s hard to digest.
Current Cowley production of 300,000 MINIs a year (I think this figure may have inadvertently included a few thousand Countrymans made in Austria by Magna Steyr) is not to be sniffed at, and most of them are usefully exported.
But the whole of the UK, which includes other stalwarts Nissan (Sunderland), Honda (Swindon) and Jaguar-Land Rover under Tata ownership, currently produces around 1.1m vehicles a year, whereas Chinese giant Shanghai Automotive Corp, usually known by the acronym SAIC, on its own produces well over 4m cars a year, and is on target to be churning out 7m by 2017.
So I was wrestling with a glass half empty or half full conundrum as I scoffed a pastry and sipped a coffee, and McLoughlin said a few nothings about wanting to work with BMW and thanks very much for the investment chaps.
Pause for 4 thoughts
Britain’s manufacturing base is a much-shrunken creature, yet the very idea that cars would still be in production in 2013 in Cowley would have seemed preposterous as recently as the early 1990s, before BMW took ownership of Rover Group and seized on the clever but still courageous idea of re-making the MINI as a global icon.
The second fact that struck me was that while Cowley banged out 600,000 Minis between 1959 and the mid-eighties, BMW has already produced over 2 million MINIs since launched in 2001. And it’s been done on less than half the acreage and a fraction of the heyday workforce, much of the latter replaced by hundreds of whirring, clicking and revolving robots.
The third fact, which is a bit academic for some of us, is BMW’s estimate that you could spec a MINI in 15 million billion ways, when taking into account all the possible tailoring options. I believe them, but it doesn’t make my life simpler. I might get scared choosing between one shade of paint and another and long for a black-only, Model-T Ford sort of world.
The final fact for this Business Car blog is that William Morris started as a bicycle repairer in his bedroom, and was a racing cyclist. He then progressed to motorbikes, and finally to four wheels.
I wonder if for all the continuing glamour of four wheels, we’re not slightly headed in the other direction.
Scared to death that someone else is going to own urban transport, almost every car maker has come up with a bicycle to take account of the ‘last mile’ having slung the big beast into a park and ride.
The only nice one I’ve seen is MINI’s folding bicycle in lime green. Apart from the colour, it works: it’s a properly engineered piece of kit and it fits in a MINI boot, which is pretty impressive.
