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. 

Range Rover 2016

Range  Rover

So, Bentley Will launch its 200mps SUV in 2016 , (read our previous article about 200 mph SUV), And the Range Rover is the elephant in the errrr, road, the 4x4 it has to beat. After a year running a Range Rover Vogue SE TDV6, we know its strengths and weaknesses inside out. And its standout strength is civility.
All Range Rovers come with standard air suspension, generous body travel and a rebuttal of the premium German doctrine that customers value sportiness above comfort. The body lopes over bumps like a lilo on waves, pitching under braking, leaning into corners. It’ll be tough for Bentley to match that pillowy ride, given the conflicting goals of phenomenal power and speed.
My fellow editor at sister magazine Auto Zeitung can’t abide the Rangie’s wallow: sure, it doesn’t handle like a Cayenne, but mechanical grip is strong, and the steering stately but supremely accurate. Drivers like Volker need the effective Dynamic Response switchable anti-roll bars, only fitted to V8s.


The 254bhp V6 diesel echoes the ride refinement, murmuring at 2200rpm on the motorway, smooth under hard acceleration. Kick down and the weight rocks backwards, before surging forward like a Mississippi steamboat: with 443lb ft, it feels quick enough, punchier than its 7.9sec 0-62mph time, your instincts saying that this leviathan couldn’t, shouldn’t, be hammering along so quickly. At motorway speeds, the wind gently rushes along the sides, tyre noise is a murmur not a roar. It’s a very civilised way to travel, not unlike how I’d imagine a Rolls or Bentley SUV.
Trunk roads are where the Rangie

accumulated most of its 27,885 miles, being the default choice for long family trips. The Range Rover attended the Belgian grand prix, holidayed in Devon, the Lake District and the Dordogne, and slogged through eight months of my 130-mile daily round trip. Fuel economy improved as time wore on, with the Rangie often surpassing 500 miles on a tank and returning 31mpg, though that’s 21%
off the official figure. And, contrary to Land Rover perception, it proved a reliable, robust companion, though some things niggled. The centre console developed a muted creak, and the dual-view screen designed to allow passengers to watch TV on the move once or twice displayed nothing but darkness.

The over-zealous fuel tank cut-off made refuelling infuriatingly slow, until I dug out a plastic rod from the boot, prodded around in the tank neck and reset the flow. And the unresponsive front parking sensors typically needed manual activation. We marked two pieces of trim: cramming a heavy box onto the front seat scuffed the leather-clad dash (our fault), but getting the solid parcel shelf in and out of its unyielding moorings is awkward, causing black marks on the inner door plastic.
The boot is a mixed blessing: it’s vast but hard to access without Inspector Gadget extendable arms, due to the drop-down door keeping you at bay. The rear seats can be powered flat with in-boot buttons; a fold-up boot divider would be equally welcome.

A gashed sidewall did for one of the 275/40 R22 Continental tyres, costing £270 for the rubber alone: that – and the challenge of finding such a vast tyre in stock – is the risk of upgrading to the £3000 split-spoke alloys. The first service cost £425+VAT.

Must-have options included the £1500 glass roof and £400 headrests with fold-out wings like a business class airline seat’s. Those with kids swore by the £1500 rear- seat entertainment system, those using the clunky infotainment system just swore. In my view, the clean but bland dashboard is a step backwards over the previous generation’s, with its architectural wood: the cabin’s design is a weak spot for opulent Bentley to exploit.

But it won’t be able to match the Range Rover’s aluminium monocoque construction, of which I proudly bragged to Chelsea tractor-haters and which is 420kg lighter than the last TDV8 Rangie. And can Bentley’s pedigree beat the renowned off-road ability and blue-chip image built by 44 years of Range Rovers? It won’t be easy. Because the past 12 months have confirmed the Range Rover is the finest luxury SUV on the planet.