LMH PPE Students Visit Oxford's MINI Factory

Organised by Ruth Tarrant, the visit saw students accompanied by tutors Professor Francis DiTraglia and Jasmin Baier. The visit offered students an opportunity to explore modern manufacturing processes and consider the economic implications of automation and technological innovation.

Roger Catchpole (2025, PPE) shares his reflections on the visit:

This past Thursday, LMH PPEists had the opportunity to visit the MINI Plant Oxford, for an insightful tour of the whole production process. 

After a quick tour of the MINI museum, seeing some famous models (The Italian Job, 2012 Olympics, Rally Racing) we began the tour of the factory.

Steel imported from Europe is processed in Swindon before being sent finally to Oxford. Here the entire process takes only 24 hours per car. The process has been near entirely automated, with the few workers on the factory floor today mainly working to maintain these robots.

In the past 4 decades, these robots have brought a workforce down from 18,000 to just 3,000.  It was fascinating to see the scale of automation, with each robot running to a precise 66 second cycle. 

On the final assembly line, we also saw different productivity improving techniques such as the inclusion of an Andon Line, and the accountability of specific teams to fix any flaws in a finished car. 

Overall, it was a brilliant experience, and led to many interesting discussions around automation and innovation, replacing labour, and what this signals for the future. It was also a great opportunity for incoming 1st year students to meet and get to know 2nd year students and their tutors.

Special thanks go to Ruth for organising the trip, and Peter and Richard for their superb tours.