Bentley Motors Automotive

Established 1919
Head Office Crewe, Cheshire
Employees 4,000
Ownership: Volkswagen
2015 Sales £1.4bn

At 400 hours per car, it takes 17 times longer to build a Bentley than a Volkswagen Golf

An unhurried approach to high-tech production

In a large industrial building on the outskirts of Crewe in north-west England, modern manufacturing blends seamlessly with traditional artisan skills from a different century. This is the home of Bentley Motors, a doyen of the UK’s luxury car making sector. On the assembly line, there is hardly a robot to be seen: instead, teams of workers carry out delicate tasks at a steady, unhurried pace.

The Bentley production line turns out some of the world's most sought-after cars but still depends on craft skills honed over generations

Where are the robots?

A few specialists spend eight hours per car, smoothing down part of a protruding weld by a fifth of a millimetre using hand tools. A machine could do the same job but would not give a surface finish that was perfect, the company argues. Some Bentley owners, at least, would notice the difference.

But as well as the sort of manual labour that recalls a bygone age, the company’s production methods also feature technology that would not look out of place in an advanced aerospace plant.

Bentley’s cars would never have gained their global reputation for excellence but for computer-aided mathematical modelling, precision cutting machines and advances in engineered materials including alloys of steel and aluminium.

“We’ve become a higher volume car manufacturer but one which uses many of the methods of a 19th century coach builder,” says Michael Straughan, Bentley’s manufacturing director.

So far Bentley has managed to avoid any repercussions from the scandal surrounding Volkswagen, the German automotive giant that has owned it since 1998. VW admitted in 2015 that it had installed “defeat” devices on up to 11m diesel cars as a way to falsify exhaust emissions readings.

Cleaning up the damage from the ruse could cost VW more than £12bn in legal costs and product modifications. As well as denting the reputation of a brand previously regarded as a paragon of German industrial superiority, the affair could have an impact on some of VW’s subsidiaries such as Bentley, for instance by reducing the funds available for investment.

For the moment, however, Bentley is continuing to reap rewards from VW’s past largesse in providing finance for product development and new equipment. More than £800m has been spent on upgrading the Crewe factory – where Bentley has been based since 1946. The latest £40m tranche of this investment – announced in late 2014 – will add another 300 research and development jobs to the 4,000-strong workforce.

Leather and wood burnish a luxury image

While in many modern factories industrial robots do much of the work, at Bentley the emphasis is on a workforce skilled in shaping metal, leather and wood

In 2016 the company sold more than 11,000 vehicles – costing up to £252,000 each – for the fourth consecutive year. The numbers showed a healthy 9 per cent rise on 2015, with strong increases in both the UK and the rest of Europe. North and South America remain the company's biggest market accounting for 25 per cent of sales, with China taking 14 per cent.

Since the early 2000s, the company has increased the annual output of its plant in Crewe by 700 per cent, taking production to a level which – though small by the standards of most well-known carmakers – is big compared to most other exclusive, high-specification brands such as Germany’s Maybach or the UK’s McLaren. By 2025, annual output could double to 20,000 cars under VW’s plans.

The production lines at Crewe look modern enough –but the pace is unhurried

Rise of an industry that many thought had died

Bentley is pinning a lot of hopes for expansion on the Bentayga sports utility vehicle, a rugged four-wheel drive with sporty looks that went on sale in 2016. The Crewe plant saw off competition from other VW factories to secure the SUV investment, which will allow the brand to diversify away from its traditional mix of luxury sports cars and saloons. “It was a fabulous prize to win,” says Straughan.

Even with the new model, however, Bentley does not intend to change its emphasis on craft-based manufacturing techniques. The approach helps to explain why it takes 400 hours to complete each of the company’s flagship Mulsanne cars – 17 times longer than it takes to build one of VW’s high-volume Golf models.

Bentley’s growth holds clear lessons for other UK-based manufacturers: a strong brand in a niche market, backed by high levels of technical skill and heavy investment, can achieve success even if volumes are modest. And if the companies can open up new markets, those volumes can expand significantly.

A tale of five companies

Over its lifetime of almost a century, Bentley’s story has been intertwined with that of four other large businesses: Rolls-Royce and Vickers of the UK, and Volkswagen and BMW of Germany.

1884 Rolls-Royce starts (under the name F.H.Royce) as an electrical goods manufacturer.
1904 Rolls-Royce branches into cars, after the founder Henry Royce meets Charles Rolls. The company’s name changes.
1919 Bentley set up by Walter Bentley in London.
1931 Bentley acquired by Rolls-Royce; production moved to Derby. Rolls-Royce makes both Rolls-Royce and Bentley brands, as well as aero engines.
1946 Rolls-Royce shifts production of both car brands to Crewe.
1973 Rolls-Royce Motor Cars formed as a separate business, leaving Rolls-Royce to concentrate on aircraft engines.
1980 Rolls-Royce Motor Cars bought by defence and engineering company Vickers.
1998 Rolls-Royce Motor Cars sold to Volkswagen. Separately, the rival German car manufacturer BMW pays £40m for the rights to the Rolls-Royce car marque, with VW allowed to make Rolls-Royce vehicles for just four years.
2003 Under the 1998 deal, BMW assumes responsibility for Rolls-Royce cars, after constructing a new plant in Goodwood, West Sussex to make them. Bentley Motors is reconstituted to make only Bentley vehicles, in Crewe.
2013 VW announces £800m investment plan for Bentley including a move to make a new “sport utility” model.
2015 Bentley says it sold a record 11,020 cars in 2014, 9 per cent up on 2013.
2016 Company announces a sales decline in the previous year, following a big downturn in China.

Where are the robots?

The contrast between the Bentley plant in Crewe and Volkswagen’s enormous Wolfsburg factory could not be starker. While the German plant – one of the world’s biggest car manufacturing centres – is bristling with hundreds of industrial robots, there are few to be seen in Bentley’s plant.

Just six robots are in use at Crewe, most of them in the engine section. In the body shop – where the basic steel skeleton for vehicles is constructed largely by welding components together – about 95 per cent of the work is done by hand, with robots accounting for the rest. In a conventional car plant, the proportions would be the other way round.

What lies behind the disparity? The answer is time and money. Such is the gentle pace of production at Crewe – a top-specification Mulsanne spends 90 minutes in one section of the plant before moving on to the next stage – that if robots were deployed in any numbers they would be idle most of the time. With such long “cycle times”, a robot would do just 20 seconds of work in the space of an hour and a half and spend the rest of the time waiting for its human co-workers to finish their jobs.

In spite of falling prices, robots remain expensive and it would make no sense to invest in machines that would be used so little. While many human workers have good grounds to worry about robots taking over their jobs, the same does not apply to most of the staff at Bentley.

Leather and wood burnish a luxury image

Every part of the production process remains labour-intensive. More than 450 people work in Bentley’s leather cutting and sewing section, creating up to 4,500 individual pieces used in the seats and other fittings for a top-of-the-range vehicle. Hides are sourced from specialist farms in Northern Europe where animals are reared in what amount to luxury conditions – at least for a cow – to ensure they avoid contact with fences and other objects that could damage their skin.

Bentley offers leather in 22 standard colours but is happy to accommodate individual tastes at a price. “If a customer wants orange, we’ll make it orange,” says Gary Lanzenby, the leader of the factory’s leather operations.

The same attention to detail guides the team responsible for the wooden fittings that feature in Bentley’s interiors. To make sure it gains access to the best quality woods, Bentley flies its production experts to the US to bid for supplies of walnut or olive ash at specialist timber auctions. Leaving the job to purchasing staff divorced from the “feel” of the Bentley factory would be short sighted, the company argues.

Rise of an industry that many thought had died

A shiny new factory in Wolverhampton underlines the UK’s newfound strength in the upper echelons of car production. The plant – which opened in 2014 – is owned by Jaguar Land Rover, the Indian-owned company that has emerged as a key driving force behind the better times for the British automotive industry.

The factory – on which JLR is due to spend almost £1bn – is set to employ more than 1,400 people. It has been designated as the company’s main site for making its new Ingenium engines, made in more than 30 derivatives for fitting to a range of JLR cars.

JLR – like many of the overseas-owned companies which use Britain as a production location – concentrates on the higher price segments of the vehicle industry. Since 2008 JLR has been owned by Tata, an Indian conglomerate.

About £2.5bn was invested in the UK car sector in 2015, according to the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, which estimates that Britain’s annual output of cars could touch its early 1970s peak of 2m by 2020.

In 2009 – immediately after the financial crisis and after a long period where the UK industry had lost ground considerably compared to other countries – output was just 1.1m.

According to Garel Rhys, a veteran industry watcher, the sector’s “renaissance” indicates how British manufacturing as a whole has reinvented itself to make more design-intensive, higher-value products.

“It shows how unwise it is to write off an industry,” says Prof Rhys, former director of the Centre for Automotive Industry Research at Cardiff Business School.