Saturday, February 27, 2016

Land Rover is booming, so it has introduced round-the-clock working. What’s it like on the graveyard shift?


It’s midnight at the oasis – the manufacturing bright spot that is JLR Halewood. Last year
the plant produced 184,000 Range Rover Evoques and Land Rover Discovery Sports. Add

production from the company’s other two manufacturing sites – Castle Bromwich and Solihull – and the combined figure of almost 490,000 was sufficient to make JLR the UK’s number one car producer in 2015.
I’m working on the night shift, taking a break between sticking Range Rover badges on Evoques to ask my fellow line workers what it’s like toiling away at Halewood when much of the country is asleep.
Not that you’d know it was midnight. For one thing, there are no windows in the walls of the vast production area, and for another,
I haven’t seen anyone walking in circles, clutching a vital component and demanding a bedtime story.

All the same, there is, I imagine, something a little different about working the night shift, which
runs from 2230 to 0630 Monday to Thursday – it finishes early Friday mornings – compared with lates (1430-2230) and earlies (0630-1430), which run from Monday to Friday.

For one thing, there’s the simple fact that while the rest of us are away with the fairies, 1000 Merseysiders are labouring amid
a maze of overhead tracks conveying Evoques and Discovery Sports at various stages of completion, to emerge fully formed into the cold night air at the rate of one every 80 seconds (from coiled steel to finished vehicle takes 48 hours).

There’s also the fact that among those curled up in their beds are many of the managers who, by day, pace up and down the Halewood plant poking, prodding and fixing.


“We’re virtually on our own at night,” one supervisor tells me, with not a little relish. “If there are any problems, we fix them.”
This, if I’m not being too fanciful, seems to breed a spirit of ‘we’re in this together’ – a feeling that if you make a slip or something plays up, your mates and supervisors will help.
However, there’s another, more powerful factor at play, too: a sense that what’s happening here at Halewood between the hours of 2230 and 0630 is too good to throw away.

The Range Rover Evoque was launched in 2011. It was an immediate hit that took JLR completely by surprise. In 2012, with delivery times standing at nine months, the company decided to introduce round-the-clock production. The 1000 vacancies attracted 35,000 applicants.

John Witty, a team supervisor, tells me how the significance of that moment is not lost on any of his 1000 colleagues in the plant tonight.

“Like most people here, I’ve done all sorts of jobs in the past and I’ve known three-day weeks, too,” he says. “None of us want to go back to that. This plant is being utilised 100% of the time, which means we’re doing something right. If we keep doing it right, that means security for all of us – for people like me with a family and a mortgage, as much as for younger people just starting out who want
to build a life and a career. Working nights is a massive deal.”

It isn’t just JLR employees who appreciate the night shift. During the course of a 24-hour working day, 6000 people will pass through the factory gates, including around 1800 contractors and suppliers. Some of those contractors, mainly DHL workers (the company is JLR’s logistics provider) are on the night shift, busily bringing components from the suppliers to the production line, just in time to be picked and fitted to the cars.
I arrive on the production line just as the previous shift – called the late shift – is ending. To ensure production isn’t delayed more than is necessary, most of the night shift crew have clocked on and taken over their so-called oppos’ responsibilities. This allows the departing late shift workers to clock off bang on 2230. By 2227 the queues of lates at the wall-mounted clocks are at least 15 deep. Most of the workers – called associates – are quiet, staring into space and winding down from eight hours
of production line toil. As 2230 arrives, there’s a burst of activity as they swipe their ID cards over the 
machines and leave the plant. By 2231, Halewood belongs to the night shift, plus one rookie: me.
Tonight, I’ll be putting the hallowed Range Rover badges on the noses of Evoques, as they pass down the production line [see panel].
As long as I can stay awake. It’s 2230. I’m tired. I want my bed. Doesn’t everyone feel like this?
Apparently not. John Whiting, a 45-year-old associate who will keep an eye on me, is not only cheerily pressing on badges but also installing third-row seats in Discovery Sports.
“It takes until Wednesday night to get into the night shift rhythm,” he says. “Your sleep pattern on the Monday night is the worst. In winter you get home and go to sleep quite quickly, but in summer it’s much harder. Most mornings I sit up with my wife, have breakfast, grab a shower and then turn in. I’m up at 2pm and potter about until it’s time to go back in. You get used to it.”
At the next work station is 21-year- old Gemma Fitzgibbon. She’s deftly installing dashboards with the
aid of a robot arm that selects the component (it’s bar-coded to ensure the right fascia goes into the right car; there are 400,000 component permutations to manage), slides it through the car’s door aperture and attaches it in seconds. She’s on top

of things. How?



“It’s the last day of the night shift,” she says. “It takes the first couple of days to adjust. At the beginning, people are tired and quiet, but as the week goes on you get used to it, and because tonight we’ll finish at 0630, we’ll have a long weekend. Our next shift rota is lates, which starts at 1430 on Monday.”

The shift rota changes weekly and is known by the sequence in which the shifts fall as ‘Len’: lates, earlies, nights. All things considered, it doesn’t sound so bad: four days of nights followed by a bank holiday weekend, every three weeks.
As I offer up the name badge to my first Evoque of the night, I wonder what my chances are of being among the one in 35 fortunate enough to win a job at the Halewood production line the next time JLR launches
a recruitment drive. 

OLD VS NEW



DO YOU PREFER A NEW 4X4 OR AN OLD ONE? I JUST GOT HOME FROM AN 800-mile road trip in a 44-year-old Jeep Wagoneer. A few months back I did a similar road trip in a brand-new Jeep Renegade Trailhawk, and you know what? I enjoyed every minute of both. The old Jeep had exhaust fumes and barely any safety features but road like a Cadi and gobbled up mountain passes with ease. The new Jeep had heated seats and a smooth clean-running four-cylinder with about as much power as the old Jeep’s V-8 but lacked the security of the manually shifted transfer case in the Wagoneer. And this isn’t just a comment on Jeeps. During the holidays I spent a week in a stunning new diesel Range Rover. I also spent a week on the road this past year in an early 1990s Land Rover Defender 110, and I really want to own both. (Oddly enough, the older 110 has climbed in value until it is worth almost as much as the new Range Rover!)
But which do you prefer? It’s easy to gripe about how new trucks are expensive, have too many computerized parts, and don’t hold their value. But it’s just as easy to com- plain that old trucks are plagued with less-than-perfect brakes, finicky fuel systems, cold and wet leaking cabs (or soft tops), and are in constant need of repair. The fact is I’m more than spoiled by the heated seats, GPS, and instant throttle response of a fresh new 4x4, and yet I’m enamored with the rattle of real steel, well-worn seats, and the timeless style of an old 4x4. I can’t decide which is better. Some days I want the chal- lenge of getting somewhere in something that could die any second, and other days it’s nice to slam the door and just marvel at all the technology in a new vehicle (Though it does seem the Wagoneer door shut more solidly than the new Renegade.)
And that’s just new versus old in stock form, what about when you start to modify them? A new 4x4 is expensive to tear into, but it makes for a nice clean slate to build off of, whereas an old 4x4 is plagued with rust and worn parts. Parts that may need to be replaced and may be hard to find a replacement for if damaged off-road. A new 4x4 has computerized nannies, speed sensors, traction control, and so on that get ticked off when we cut and hack or tweak, tune, and hot rod the engines. At the same time, the comfort and performance of a modified and trail-ready new 4x4 is pretty awesome. The old 4x4s, on the other hand, are great because you can ditch all the unreliable stuff and add late-model fuel-injected engines and new drivetrain to end up with a 4x4 that per- forms like new but with age-old body lines. Sure, carbs and drums are fun to tinker with and make for an adventure if they don’t work perfect, but I prefer some of the technol- ogy we’ve developed over the years to make wheeling more fun. But I also love a steel dash, not a plastic-coated one.
I guess that’s the answer: The perfect 4x4 would be a mix of new and old. Part classic patina’d body. Part late-model comfort and performance. Part adventure to just keep it run- ning. Part reliable enough never to leave you stranded. I guess there just isn’t a perfect 4x4.