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Most automakers like to tell you how quickly they can build a car. At Crewe, where Bentleys have been built since 1946, they like to tell you how long it takes.
It takes two hours for one man just to braze the two pieces that form a Brooklands front fender together and then smooth the join to a seamless finish. Piecing together the whole body-in-white takes 130 hours. Each set of wood veneers for the car means a month of work. Trimming the interior takes 125 hours. Every engine is hand-assembled by one man.
Each Brooklands that rolls off the end of the assembly line at Crewe represents 660 hours of labor, which is why there will only be 550 built over the next three years. By contrast, Toyota needs just 16 hours to assemble a complete Corolla.
Walk around Crewe and you'll regularly meet people on the factory floor with 25 to 30 years' experience. These aren't folks who just press buttons on robots or simply fit tab A into slot B all day long; they're highly skilled craftsmen, from the metal workers in the body shop to the cabinetmakers in the wood shop to the upholsterers in the trim shop. They can make anything; for example, the roof for the first Brooklands prototype was hand-formed by four Crewe workers using a century-old metal-shaping device called an English Wheel. It took them a week.
You can sense the intense pride in the craftsmanship at Crewe, though it's tinged with regret that, since BMW acquired Rolls-Royce, employees can no longer say they work at "Royce's." Henry Royce, the perfectionist engineer who always referred to himself as a mechanic, once said: "Whatever is rightly done, however humble, is noble." It may not be politically correct to say so now that VW owns the place, but his spirit lives on at Bentley.
Inside Crewe: Building Bentleys to a different beat - Consumer - Motor Trend
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