There’s a man on the Rover 75 production line at Longbridge who represents the continuing place of humankind in a world of techno-robotics.
He fits boot-lids. I watched him, fascinated and deeply thankful at the same time.
The lid fitted, he closed it. Then, without looking, he ran his fingers down each side where it joined the rear wings of the car. He opened the boot again, loosened a hinge slightly with a spanner, then beat it, not at all gently, with a rubber hammer. He closed the lid, ran his fingers along the seams again, and nodded to himself. Then he stepped aside and went to deal with the next bootlid for the next car on the inexorably-moving line.
He was just one of many real people in a world of robots at the MG Rover assembly plant in Longbridge. Everywhere on the lines that roll out 75s, the new 75 Tourer, 25/45s and the MGF (I even spotted a couple of pre-production MG ZTs being worked through the system) there are swivelling, spark-spitting, even frightening robots doing things to bits of cars which are not for description on a family page.
Working without coffee- or loo-breaks. Accurate to milli-microns. Faster than any human could be. A bean-counter’s dream. Or maybe nightmare, because there certainly are echoes of a high-tech Hades about sections of a modern car factory. But the robots work diligently, to order, and without even a thought of rebellion.
Though without soul. That is still the attribute only of humankind and its Creator. And so far, whether it is through programming in the commands that work the computers which control the robots, or making sure that the bootlid lines up with its relevant wing, there is still a place in even the most electroniced world for the ‘old grey matter’ and the craft and artistry for which it is the source.
There does seem to be a soul about the Rover 75 and it probably comes from the people who make it. Car factories are not the nicest places to work, but I saw many people on the Longbridge production lines who were smiling.
Maybe it was with relief that they have survived? It is no understatement to say that MG Rover (as it is named now) has been figuratively buried several times over the last year or so. Bought by BMW and subsequently discarded by the German carmaker, though not before they had invested substantially in the plant outside Birmingham. It really did seem for a time , however, that there was not going to be a Rover anymore.
There IS, though. And if enthusiasm was negotiable currency, MG Rover would be very rich indeed. It is, mind you, not poor. At least in terms of money owed. Because the deal which BMW finally agreed to gave the new owners a reasonable time scale to repay various loan arrangements, without interest, on what was being bought. Operations director Chris Bowen says MG Rover will be operationally breaking even by the end of 2002.
The company is also on the verge of more than doubling its product range, albeit partly through what used to be called ‘badge engineering’, with the launch next month of a set of MG cars based on the current Rover range. We’re promised, though, that the MG versions will have all the sporty attributes that this particular badge represents.
But more than that, a decision will be finalised this summer on a completely new platform which will be used to build a brand-new set of mid-sized cars, due for production in 2004. And, despite the doomsayers who suggest that MG Rover would need a partner or a takeover to bring in the investment for new models, Bowen says the new platform programme is already ‘fully funded’.
The 75 platform, first used with the saloon in 1999, has perhaps seven years of life left in it. But Large Car Platform Director Dr Chris Millard makes the point that it will be constantly developed and enhanced throughout the rest of its life. The Tourer estate version which I watched being built and also drove last week is so far the only new version on the horizon, but Millard didn’t rule out any further derivatives in coming years.
There was a lot of bad press about quality control around the time that BMW were thinking of dumping Rover. At the Longbridge plant there are many indications of the value put on quality control by the factory operators and the individual workers.
I asked how many of the 5,500 MG Rover workers were involved in quality control, and was told: ‘everybody’. Each ‘work cell’ is a team for both production and quality control. “It’s better do it this way than get a car at the end which has to be sent back for major fixing,” the plant executive said.
The robots said nothing. Just continued to spit sparks and weld together various bits of metal pressings to eventually make up recognisable sections of a car. But they all worked in unison. As, it seems, do the human assemblers.
Occasionally, though, it was possible for the odd person to sit and read a paper while waiting for the next body-in-white to arrive.
For the ability to do that, perhaps there are some jealous robots in Longbridge? A soul is kind of a nice thing to have.
June 2001
by Brian Byrne