HOW TO BUILD A CAR FACTORY (USING A HELICOPTER)

THE GROUND WASN’T broken at Jaguar Land Rover’s new Nitra plant until October last year. The first pile went in in November and at times during the winter it was -20deg C and the ground was frozen a metre deep; yet they’re still on track to hand over the building at the end of this year, ready for production.

It’s being put up quickly: a Russian heavy-lift helicopter has been commissioned, twice, to lift equipment up to the roof. Using it, it took an hour and a half to shift equipment that would otherwise have taken three weeks.

Bill Patrick, the project construction director, is the bloke who has to make it all happen and the hall we are in is where the car’s bodies will be constructed. They’ve started delivering the robots: there’ll be 588 of them, with 342 rivet guns, 18 weld guns and 106 turn tables.

They’ll sit on a totally flat floor. There are only a couple of places where the floor is broken, to install isolated test and calibration rigs. In total, this hall is 90,000m2 alone, with 398 columns holding up 5300 tonnes of steel. From the roof will hang a conveyer — the fastest in Europe — to move car bodies down the line. And everything else — power, water, air — is delivered via the roof, too.

They might want to rearrange things on the floor in future, see, so they can’t afford systems that run underground and need to be dug back up. As for power, there’s a power sub-station under construction for the factory. As well as a railhead.