Car Factory Tours at Halewood

In Brief.

The Halewood car factory in Merseyside has been manufacturing Ford and, more recently, Jaguar Land Rover vehicles since the early 1960s.  Guided tours of the factory lead small groups through the manufacturing process from pressing of metal sheets into car body panels, through assembly and fitting-out, to final quality assessment and testing.  The factory is large and impressive, with cars made to order following a just-in-time manufacturing process, and the tour provides a detailed and informative run through.

The JLR Experience Centre

What's Here?

Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) provides factory tours at both its main manufacturing sites, at Solihull and Halewood. Halewood has been making JLR products since the Jaguar X-Type in the early 2000s, and at the time of my visit was making both Land Rover Discovery Sport and Range Rover Evoque models at the site. These share the same underlying platform and engines, and vehicle models can alternate through much of the production process. 

Tours need to be booked ahead, and involve a small group (in my case a group of size one) with a guide. The guide has a microphone, and in a sometimes noisy environment can be heard through headsets worn by people taking the tour. 

After a short drive in a locally made vehicle, the tour begins in the pressing plant, where steel or aluminium sheets are pressed and cut up to 5 times in pressing machines the size of a row of terraced houses. The resulting parts are assembled into body shells in the highly automated body shop, where robots hold panels in place for welding, bolting and gluing together, followed by robotic inspection. The resulting shell of the car is then painted, before being combined with its drive train, which is assembled by a separate factory-within-a-factory.

While there are rather few workers to be found in the earlier stages of manufacture, fixtures and fittings are added to the body shells in production lines where each station is staffed. So, for example, parts that have been worked on separately, such as the dashboard or doors, are added to the car with manual intervention or supervision. Each step in the production line takes around 90 seconds.  

The increasingly finished product, receives it fluids and software before being subject to quality inspection and testing, prior to heading on its way to customers in the UK or overseas.

The overall impression is that the manufacturing process involves massive amounts of coordination and planning to seem so very measured and orderly.  Although it is easy to watch videos of car factories, it is certainly worth seeing one up close to appreciate quite what is involved in producing a complex modern vehicle.

Alas, cameras are not allowed on the tour, hence the lack of images to illustrate the process.

Practicalities.

Distance from Manchester Town Hall: 30 miles

Drive Time: 45 minutes

Price: $$$

Parking: There is parking at the Experience Centre

Food and Drink: Tea/coffee/biscuits are included with the tour

Retail therapy: They don't seem to sell cars at the factory!

Child Friendly: Children from 10 can attend tours with adults; there's a lot to see.

Toilets: Yes.

Do it justice in: The tour takes 3 hours.

Inside-Outside: 100:0