Fifteen AS & A2 Level Design & Technology students visited Jaguar / Land Rover Halewood. Following an extensive and interesting company overview and health & safety briefing at the Education & Conference Centre at Halewood, students had an exciting visit to the factory floor. This extraordinary and exclusive tour offered a firsthand insight into the manufacture of both the Freelander 2 and the innovative and exciting new Range Rover Evoque. Students were privileged to witness all stages of manufacture from raw material input through to final vehicle testing. The sensory experience of this truly innovative manufacturing facility was something that couldn’t fail to inform, excite and inspire.

“The trip to the Jaguar Land Rover plant at Halewood was a very interesting and eye opening experience. The tour started with the body shop, where the doors, roof panels etc are pressed from sheet metal then spot welded by robots, It was great to see the amount of work the robots do, and also how high tech the robots were, they were able to perform more than one job and able to change their own tools to produce Freelander or Evoque parts. Also the body shop also showed the scale of production as the robots work almost 24 hours a day. The next area we saw was the assembly line where everything from the steering wheel to the seats were put into the shell. This is done by human workers, but they only have 90 seconds to do their job before the line moves on and if they fail to complete it, the line must stop, and we were quoted that it would cost nearly £10,000 per stop. This really showed the efficiency that must be upheld in a factory and gave a good insight into this kind of production. So overall I think that it was a very exciting and useful trip; giving a good look at how cars and commercial products are manufactured, it's just a shame they didn't give away freebies of a new Evoque each!”

Tommy Reeves L6KS

"By going to the Land Rover factory, we were able to see very clearly the stages that create a working car by being there and watching the whole process take place. This was a very different experience to watching a YouTube video or a television programme showing car manufacture because to see the robotics moving and working so close by to you really was something quite special. I had no idea about the precision the machines could provide and found it impressive how they could produce so many finished, working cars in one day (700 on average). It was a great trip and we all learnt a lot from it"

Charlotte Gurran L6SD