Blown Away by Bentley

Sales manager Joe Jardine blogs about his trip to Bentley Motor Cars.

This month I attended a South Cheshire Chamber business networking event at Bentley Motor Cars. I got to meet plenty of business owners and influential people but the reason for this blog article is to tell you about the inspirational Bentley factory tour.

The event included a fascinating half hour presentation about the history of the luxury automotive manufacturer and how it continues to evolve, adapting to the latest challenges whilst still delivering their vision of developing and crafting the World’s most desirable high performance cars. This was followed by a two hour tour of their Crewe site. Unlike many other car manufacturers, Bentley design, build and sell cars from the single site, in a huge all in one operation.

Despite living less than 10 miles from the factory and having driven past it hundreds of times, I’d never set foot through the big fancy glass doors. The first thing that struck me was how spotlessly clean the entire site was. I was in a group of ten and at the beginning of the tour we were invited to stop any worker along our route and have a chat. Each individual we spoke to was extremely passionate and had a story or two to tell. These ranged from how their role has changed over the years to keep up with the latest technology and the extensive training they’ve been on, to the lavish customisation requests that they have received from rich extrovert celebrities. Personalised ‘his and hers’ crystal champagne flutes in the arm rest anyone? Or what about a £5k child seat?

Bentley are part of the Volkswagen Group. In 2011 they sold over 7,000 vehicles with the new Continental GT accounting for approximately one third of them. This is a huge vamp up in production compared to a decade ago when they were making a little over 1,000 cars. During the past ten years to keep up with demand they have introduced lots of new lean practices and machine automation to ensure everything runs efficiently. They have a number of quarter million pound machines that are programmed with certain shapes that are required for the interior trim. It was fantastic to watch the machine review a piece of material, recognise the pre-marked blemishes and then make the cuts to maximise the utilisation. That said, they still employ around 4,000 people with many more jobs at key suppliers dependent on Bentley.

Some interesting facts:-

• Subject to the amount of leather, it takes a highly skilled person between 5 and 8 hours to handstich each steering wheel.
• Bentley are expecting big things for their next car as they are entering the SUV market. Their concept car received the most amount of press interest at the recent Geneva show.
• Bentley is the jewel in the VW Group crown. The VW Group also includes Audi, Bugatti, Lamborghini, Porsche, Seat, Skoda and Volkswagen.
• Rolls Royce who previously owned Bentley, chose to build the factory in Crewe because of the good railway links, the skilled workforce and for the cloud cover to help protect them from bombing raids! At that stage they were building aeroplane engines to help with the war efforts.
• Bentley have won the Le Mons 24 hour race six times, 1924, 1927, 1928, 1929, 1930 and more recently in 2003.
• Bentley source their veneers from Atlas customer, Nantwich Veneers! Visit them and see the work they do at www.nantwichveneers.com

  

Bentley run organised tours for members of the public. If you’re interested in cars, luxury or manufacturing in general then I certainly recommend you take a trip. Click here for further details.

Right I’m off to sell lots of systems to earn sufficient commission so that I can afford the Bentley Continental GT.