MINI Plant Oxford toured by Business Students
Report by Julia E
On the 26th February, a group of Business students in Year 12 at MPW visited the BMW MINI factory in Oxford, where thousands of parts are brought together to produce the cars.
At the factory, we visited two different buildings: the Body Shop and the Assembly. In the Body Shop we saw how more than 1200 robots work on building the basic framework of the MINI car. Even though the production of the factory is mostly automated, there are still around 600 employees, who work on the more customised and detailed jobs which cannot be done by robots and machines. The Assembly is the place where the shape of the car is finally created. It follows the path from the installation of the cockpit through to the fitting of the power units and to validation, where the car is put through its paces.
We were unable to take photographs of these two buildings visited on the tour for safety reasons. However, we were treated to a guided tour of the Welcome Zone, where we enjoyed the presentation of rare car collections.
