Before we saw Fido, a mechanical inspection dog, for the first time, our guide Nigel warned us: “Don’t touch the dog and give it way on stairs.”

I visited BMW Group’s Oxford MINI Plant with my 17-year-old son Adam, who dreams of studying engineering.

In the body shop, we climbed to a mezzanine and looked across a vast floor: robots to the horizon, welding and assembling car bodies, with barely a human in sight.

BMW says around 1,200 robots work in the body shop today, assembling around 800 cars daily. We were told that only 200 people work in this shop across two shifts. 

More than 3,000 people work in total across BMW’s Oxford and Swindon plants.

Waves of automation

Cars have been built at the Oxford site since 1913. 

At its peak in the early 1960s, the plant employed 28,000 people. BMW acquired the Rover Group, including the Oxford plant, in 1994.

Our guide Nigel had worked at this factory for nearly four decades and lived through two waves of automation, in the 1990s and 2010s. 

People were retrained. Jobs changed. Fewer workers were needed for many tasks, while more of the remaining work shifted toward working alongside the machines.

Automation doesn’t turn every remaining human job into something more creative or fulfilling. When your job is watching a machine that normally works perfectly, maintaining concentration becomes a challenge. Workers therefore rotate between tasks regularly.

When we walked into the final assembly, the humans returned. People and machines worked side by side, attaching cockpits, wiring, or seats. 

What automation delivered

One thing robots clearly improved is manufacturing consistency. 

Robots can repeat thousands of welds and measurements with extraordinary precision, producing a level of consistency that was difficult to achieve by hand.

BMW says qualified employees increasingly control, monitor, and maintain these systems.

Every car is built to an individual customer specification: body colours, wheels, interiors, lights, and more.

Different cars can move one after another down the same line, with the robots knowing which parts and configuration belong to each one. 

What AI changes now

Every year, I visit around 50 newsrooms across the world. They employ anywhere from three to 2,000 journalists. 

Walking the Mini factory floor, I found myself wondering: Is this how newsrooms will soon look too? Am I silly?

For decades, industrial automation transformed mostly physical and routine work. Many of us in offices could watch from a safe distance.

Now AI is moving up the knowledge ladder into analysis, writing, planning, coding, engineering, and management.

What jobs do humans keep?

At BMW, someone still has to design the car and the system that builds the car.

Someone has to programme the robots, deploy them into the production line, maintain them, diagnose failures, analyse quality, organise the logistics feeding thousands of parts into the factory.

At the end of our tour, we watched as someone had to drive the ready-made car from the production line to a parking lot next to a railway station.

Before leaving, I asked Nigel what advice he had for people facing this next wave of automation. He shrugged: “When technology changes, you change the way you work with it, too.”

Greg’s Readers First newsletter is a public face of a revenue and media subscriptions initiative by INMA, outlined here. INMA members can subscribe here.

Banner photo: Adobe Stock by Gorodenkoff.

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