Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Ing for a car crash?
History and our workers but MPS should take care Rich motoring past & there’s more to come
ar’s Castle Bromwich plant will close he next few years but I worry JLR ’t be able to sustain the remaining hull and Halewood plants and keep Slovak factory, where production s are lower, at full capacity. no-deal Brexit in March would have ubstantial and immediate effect, nly because of the just-in-time hod of car production. If parts are yed and the production line has to topped it costs millions. few years ago at a small airport r Peterborough, a surprising mber of helicopters were coming going. I asked what was going on. They’re taking brake discs to the nda factory in Swindon because e’s a supply problem” was the wer. How much does that cost? Less n shutting down the line for a day, s for sure. On the day JLR announced job losses Honda said it was closing its Swindon plant for six days in April because of Brexit.
It’s one precaution BMW is taking among many. It says: “We’ve had to assume a worst-case scenario. We build 1,000 Minis a day at our Oxford plant and each car contains around 4,000 parts from mainland Europe. That’s four million parts per day and a lot of lorries. We’re sourcing a team of customs experts, updating our customs IT and looking at extra warehousing.”
Companies making relative small numbers of cars: Rolls-royce, Bentley and Aston Martin, won’t be badly hit because these are not cars that come off the production line like sausages. It takes 300 hours to assemble a Rollsroyce Phantom and about 10 to build a Japanese hatchback.
Which brings us to the three Japanese car plants in the UK. Nissan has been hugely successful here but Honda in Swindon and Toyota in Burnaston, Derbys, have never performed as well as hoped.
I worry that their parent companies could use Brexit as an excuse to close UK factories rather than admit their plans hadn’t worked out. A no-deal Brexit means WTO rules and a 10% tariff on cars crossing the channel each way.
UK car buyers face an average of £1,500 on the price of a new car, says the SMMT. There will also be 4.5% on parts.
But it’s not all gloom. Mazda, which doesn’t manufacture in the UK, reckons Brexit could create opportunities.
UK boss Jeremy Thomson says: “As a distributor we have always had to account for a tariff in our business model so if one is imposed on UK car imports it would level the playing field.”
Whatever happens, moving car plants takes a lot of planning, so we won’t be seeing empty factories any time soon.
If you sell a huge numbers of cars in a country, it makes sense to build them there. And British car workers are highly skilled and often the jewel in global companies’ manufacturing.
So if I get a warm feeling of pride when I see a British cars being driven abroad, I can’t imagine what it must feel like to see one and know you helped build it. NO other country has such a varied history of car making as Britain – from handbuilt Morgan cars to huge robotpopulated ultra-modern plants like Nissan in Sunderland.
And we have long attracted foreign car companies. Ford opened its first UK factory at Trafford Park in Manchester to build Model Ts in 1911.
Until then Herbert Austin’s Wolseley Motors had been our largest manufacturer. Humber had been making cars in Coventry since 1898, Sunbeam in Wolverhampton from 1901 and Rover arrived in Coventry in 1904.
During the inter-war years Oxfordbased Morris and Austin, from Birmingham, dominated the market, and from 1932 until 1955 the UK was Europe’s largest car maker.
With American competition from
Ford and Vauxhall, a merger created the British Motor Corporation (BMC) in 1952 made up of Austin, Morris, MG, Riley and Wolseley, before further consolidation led to the creation of the later infamous British Leyland in 1968.
The first British car to sell a million was the Morris Minor in 1961.
The Sixties saw the launch of many models which now inspire nostalgia the Ford Cortina, Hillman Imp and Hunter, the Rover P6, Jaguar E-type, MG B and Triumph Spitfire.
Car factories frequently change hands, usually after the owners are taken over by another maker. Rootes Group had a large factory at Ryton near Coventry (built by Rootes as aeroengine plant at the start of the Second World War) but became part of Peugeot Talbot in 1978 and shut finally in 2006.
A vast number of great names have disappeared, but it’s not all been bad news. Nissan opened its huge factory in 1986 when the first Bluebird came off the line. Toyota followed in 1992 and Honda started building the Accord at Swindon, Wilts, in 1992.
Even today new factories are opening: Aston Martin will this year open a plant at St Athan near Cardiff where it will build its new DBX SUV and future electric models. Britain’s long history of car building will never come to an end. Not in our lifetimes.