Day 12 - MINI !!!

Earliest start so far this holiday.  Managed to get everyone up and out of the guest house by 7:00am.  An hour and fourty-five minutes later we arrived at MINI Plant Oxford.  No photography was allowed on the tour and so I only have external photos to share.  This is the reception building.  They have a small display inside outlining the history of car making at the Cowley location.  They're celebrating 100 years of car making in this location as you can see below.

After a short introduction from our tour guide, John, we boarded a minibus and were taken through the gates into the plant site.

The large silver building in the left of the picture above represents a £500M investment and is the new steel pressing plant where all future MINI bodyshells will be made.  Tooling is almost complete and they're about to start production here (?).  It's full of robots to do all of the heavy and precision work.  Workers will probably do mostly quality control types activities.  The tour will be extended next year to include this facility.  John figured it would add an hour to the existing tour.

We headed off to the Assembly plant where all of the components for the Cooper (all variants), Clubman, Coupe & Roadster Come together in a single assembly line.  450 cars are assembled in each 11 hour shift making that 900 cars a day are assembled and shipped from the facility.

Now I'm a logistics junky so the sheer number of processes that have to be linked together to assemble a car boggles the mind.  As its a single assembly line for all versions of the cars I've listed, the systems have to delivery the correct component to the correct point on the line for the given car.  Given that MINI allows an almost unlimited combination of options to be spec'd this is amazing.

For example, the seats arrive from Banbury by truck each day.  The seat supplier has to load each truck in the order requested by MINI to ensure the correct seat option arrives at the correct car on the assembly line.  As a customer I would have hated to have ordered the Recaro seats only to have gotten the regular cloth seats.

This exacting logistical nightmare occurs over and over again at hundreds of assembly stations along the line.  Wow!

BTW - We we told there's over 1 1/2 miles of wire in the wiring harness for each MINI.  Facts that confound.