English luxury car company Bentley use a surprisingly small amount of automation in their vehicles' creation, and the artisanal nature of their manufacturing is part of their reason for not outsourcing.
UK’s The Telegraph has obtained footage of the company’s Crewe factory in action (see below).
Bentley’s CEO has spoken recently of the resistance to the parent company’s (Volkswagen’s) attempts to outsource to low-cost Bratislava in Slovakia.
Bratislava, according to a survey this year by Colliers, is one of the top three low-cost manufacturing cities in Europe.
Wolfgang Schreiber, Bentley’s CEO, told The Telegraph earlier this month that he had to fight the parent company’s wishes to move manufacturing from Crewe.
“I knew that our customers want a real Bentley, and a real Bentley comes from the UK, from Crewe, made by our people here,” he said. According to the article, Bentley's Mulsanne model takes almost 400 hours to manufacture, with half of this spent on the car's interior.
Click here to watch the video.
Image: http://slamxhype.com