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February

Online - 'Smart' Cars

START TIME:

February 2025

END TIME:

February 2025

LOCATION:

Online

VENUE:

The Collections Centre

TICKETS

FREE activity. If you can, please make a donation.

Check out this month's activities, and discover how car production has changed over time!

The British motor industry has come a long way since the days of master craftsmen producing ornate wooden coachwork, making expensive luxuries for only the wealthiest in society. From body build to roll test, today’s cars can be built in a matter of hours, not days or even weeks. Once the average of 30,000 individual components has been produced and brought to the assembly line, the build for a mass-market car can take as little as 18 hours to complete.

Europe’s first assembly line was built at Ford’s Trafford Park facility in 1911, Ford’s first outside the USA. The assembly line meant lower unit costs and a clever marketing campaign for the Model T led initially to high sales, and by 1913 Ford was Britain’s leading car manufacturer with a 24 percent market share, producing 6,138 cars every year.

FordModelT

At Longbridge, Herbert Austin (apparently a fan of Ford’s) utilised the moving assembly line to produce the little Austin Seven from 1922, bringing car ownership closer to the reach of the ordinary working public. Thanks to the first moving assembly lines for both chassis and car bodies in Britain, production of the Austin Seven was based on a strategy of high volumes, small profit margins and low prices for the consumer.

AustinSevenAsYouLikeIt-08

Today much of the work on the assembly line is automated, as you can see from the image of the production line in Solihull in 2012 where the build of the Land Rover Discovery 4 V8, the millionth Discovery, is underway.

1m_discoverybuild_solihull_10 (3)

By February 2012, one million Discoverys of all types had been built and a special ceremony was held at the Solihull factory to celebrate the occasion. Once the celebrations were over, the one millionth Discovery embarked on an 8000-mile drive called the Journey of Discovery, accompanied by three similar vehicles and, for part of the way, by a Series I 86" model. The route took them from Solihull to Beijing via Geneva, arriving in time to go on display at the Beijing Motor Show. 

Take a look at some of the automated or ‘smart’ features in your home. Now get your designer’s cap on and think about ways in which smart features would be beneficial during the build process or part of a futuristic car’s design. Post your idea on our Facebook page - don’t forget to use the hashtag #ExploringBMM!

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