The first thing you need to know about the Rolls-Royce car plant in Goodwood, Sussex, is that the factory is part of the package. When you buy a Rolls-Royce car, you buy into the quality, craftsmanship and attention to detail of the car’s manufacturing. The customer therefore visits the factory, multiple times, to see their car being made. It’s part of the ‘brand experience’.
The second most important thing to know is the ‘bespoking’ that goes on at the factory. Each car is unique. Every one that goes down the line is highly customised to a customer’s whims – from colour-matching the paintwork to their dog’s fur to the installation of fridges and microwaves in the rear.
The third thing is the almost total lack of robots. It’s undeniably a modern factory, with large open, airy, clean spaces, a high ceiling and big plate-glass windows. It’s immaculately organised, but eerily quiet for a car factory. There is hardly any automation. No robotic arms routinely welding, sparks falling everywhere behind enclosures, no rush of pneumatic tools or clunking of conveyors. No noise, no bustle.
This is because of the low-volume, high-price point of the cars. Last year, Rolls-Royce sold 4,063 cars, the first time in its 111-year history it’s gone over 4,000 cars in a year.
Historically, the US was Rolls-Royce’s largest export market. China overtook it from 2011, but this year the US regained the title.
Elegant Dawn arrives
The latest addition to Rolls-Royce’s roster of cars is the Dawn. Billed as a more relaxed and informal car, the convertible’s soft top, which the company claims is the quietest on the market, retracts in 21 seconds at speeds of up to 30mph (48km/h).
The 6.6-litre, V12, turbocharged engine produces 563bhp (5,523kW), enabling the car to do 0-60mph in less than five seconds and reach a limited top speed of 155mph. The Dawn weighs 2,560kg and will cost £250,000.
Gavin Hartley, bespoke design manager for Rolls-Royce UK, says: “The front-end LED headlamps are sculpted. The veins have been set back into the grille for a low, strong stance. The low windscreen emphasises the width. This is a low-slung, elegant car, less ‘architectural’ than the Wraith. It retains the masculine qualities while also being more feminine.”
Common platform
Rolls-Royce cars are designed in Munich, Germany, but a team of engineers at Goodwood works on bespoking the cars. In the past 10 years, the team has grown from two people to 15, says Hartley.
The Dawn is built on the same platform as Rolls-Royce’s Wraith coupé and Ghost, but uses 80% different body parts to set
it apart, he says.
The Dawn also has an updated suspension system based on air springs. The common platform, though, means that the introduction of the Dawn will not have a substantial impact on the manufacturing line.
The Goodwood plant was opened in 2003, before which Rolls-Royces were made in Crewe. When Volkswagen sold the Rolls-Royce brand to BMW in 1998, the German company built the 242,000ft3 (22,482m2) factory at Goodwood for
£60 million. In its first year of operation, the factory produced 300 cars. In 2014, it built 4,063. The plant now employs almost 1,500 workers, who in BMW’s words “continue the tradition of hand-built luxury vehicles, combining precision engineering with traditional craftsmanship”.
The factory operates two shifts a day, Monday to Friday. There is one production line and up to three workers per station, with 16 stages in the line.“There are no robots. We want complete flexibility, and every car is unique. If a part doesn’t fit, we stop the line and gently sort it out. Nothing is rushed. They are made with love, care and attention,” says David Deane, whose job it is to show customers around the Rolls-Royce plant.
The Goodwood facility assembles the cars, and does the paint, wood, leather and embroidery. The skeletal aluminium body shells arrive from Dingolfing, Germany, having been treated in several different chemical baths for anti-corrosion. They go into the paint shop, where they are washed and have between seven and 14 layers of paint applied. A Rolls-Royce can carry up to 64kg of paint, whereas most modern cars have just two coats of paint that weigh around 9kg. The paint shop is the only place in the factory to use robots. They are used because they do not leave brush strokes and produce less waste.
Journey to the chapel
The painting process takes up to a week, after which the cars go to the surface finish shop, where the bodies are painstakingly waxed and hand-polished. The doors are then removed before the car starts its journey down the production line proper, for the fit-out of components and accessories. The plant is laid out in a large T-shape, with the main line running down the centre of the stem of the T. Either side of the line are racks of components queued up, ready to be picked and supplied to the line using a just-in-time system.
The first significant stop is at a workstation colloquially called the ‘chapel’ – where the powertrain and the chassis are ‘married’. This ‘marriage’ is achieved with a £1.5 million piece of kit that raises the car bodies, slides the powertrain underneath and correctly aligns the two. The powertrain is attached to the chassis with 16 large bolts.
“The tolerances are so tight that we use tools that are connected to a computer through wi-fi. So if there is an issue it can be traced back through manufacturing,” says Deane.
The exhaust systems are then fitted to the car, followed by the doors and roof and the hand-cut leather and wood pieces. The wood and leather are where the individual craftsmanship aspect of a Rolls-Royce car really shines.
In a Rolls-Royce Phantom, for example, there are 48 pieces of wood, each taking a month to create. Each piece is engineered – 60 layers of wood and aluminium pressed at pressures of 200lb (90.72kg) at 200°C. One tree is used per car. More than 400 people work in the wood shop, with both this workshop and the leather workshop bustling with people in contrast to the production line below.
The leather upholstery takes two weeks to produce, and comes from bulls kept in a high-altitude part of Bavaria. Bull leather is used because it reduces the risk of stretch marks from pregnancy.
“It can take up to a year to get all the constituent parts of a car together, and then two days to assemble it,” says Deane.
At the end of the line, at the junction of the T, the cars are customised in bays to the right before going left to be inspected and tested. They are tested in an anechoic chamber for acoustics, each wheel on a separate hydraulic plate. They are then put on the rolling road, where, among other tests, they are hosed with high-pressure water for 15 minutes.
Old and new side by side
Despite the feeling of continuity and tradition, there is a refreshing modernity to the Goodwood factory, and there are impending changes that will further ensure the longevity of the brand and of Rolls-Royce operations in Sussex.
Lots of alterations are planned for the factory ahead of the 2017 launch of Rolls-Royce’s first SUV, announced earlier this year. The company is also building a technology and logistics centre in nearby Bognor Regis.
The 30,000m2 site will employ 200 people and host an inbound warehouse for production parts, a distribution centre, a finished car store, and a workshop for car preparation.
The Rolls-Royce brand will continue to roll on this century, it would seem, as slowly as its Goodwood production line and heritage craftsmanship allow.
Did you know? - Rolls-Royce Goodwood factory
- Each Rolls-Royce car takes around 400 hours to be constructed by a team of 500 specialists and craftsmen.
- Rolls-Royce has 44,000 individual exterior paint colours to choose from
- The Phantom’s V12 engine can haul 2.5 tonnes from 0 to 100km/h in 5.9 seconds
- The Ghost and Wraith models account for 80% of Rolls-Royce’s production