Assembly in China / End of Lode Lane

Isn't that the ultimate sacrilege?

I spent hours there once whinging about my then new Series 2a losing oil at the rate of a pint a week from the main box. They fixed it while I waited in the end :)

It is - I'm surprised that they would consider closing Solihull after the ill-will genetared towards Jaguar by closing Browns Lane.

The marketing men & bean counters will doubtless have very good reasons on paper for saying where it's made doesn't matter (and they'd probably be right for Freelander), but balance sheets don't take into account brand image (the real image, not the marketing mens glossy brochure version) and, let's face it, the Made In England bit. Just look at the meltdown at Wedgewood after they moved production overseas, and the consequent complete collapse of the entire Stoke pottery industry.

Richard

Duracell Bunny uttered summat worrerz funny about:

I presume you mean China, it would take far longer in the UK to raise an invoice never mind fix it.

Lee D

Seems ona news this am, new freeloader is going to Hailwood.

Unless I've missed something (I have to admit "news" regarding Freelanders doesn't leap out at me!), it's been made there for some time.

Richard

I was not aware of the collaspe of wedgewood, however I remember seeing a BBC program, forgot the name of it but the Main Spanner was meant to spend a week mixing it with the plebs. Anyway at that stage they were talking about mechanisation and how it was going to imporove things. As you say, somtimes image is not all about beancounting.

That said, there is not doubt that LR need to jack up quality. I spoke to a chap at the airport the other day who has just bought a LandCruiser Pickup which costs a massive ZAR320 000 here in South Africa. He said that after five LR's in five years, each of them needing major repairs (like new gearboxes) and suffering even bigger depreciation he finally thought that he had given them enough of an oppertunity to prove themselves.

I just wish they could retain their core values while enjoying toyota levels of reliability and resale values.

Regards Stephen

Sorry it was NEWs to me.

On or around Wed, 25 Oct 2006 14:55:41 +0200, "fanie" enlightened us thusly:

not sure that moving production to China is gonna do much for the quality.

What, you mean it might improve??

Think of the sales potential two hours after you bought one you would fancy another. I reckon China is a smoke screen if you want to be efficient you build them close to your major market so its either US or Cheshire where all the minted footballers live. Derek

I thought it was Royal Doulton that moved to China? Have Wegewood gone as well?

No, Lode Lane. They fixed it FOC as it was only 3 weeks old. I just drove there from home (I used to live in Leamington Spa many eons ago)

Bit of whingeing from one of the people there (folks just turning up at the factory expecting their vehicles to be fixed blah blah) but they did it, did it quickly & did it well. This would have been around 1968 ...

A very large number of the new Freelanders are destined for China.

They have the fastest growing economy in the history of our planet.

A quote from Newsnight last night was that if, in the UK we ALL stopped using our cars to prevent global warming, the growth in China in just 86 days alone would match the reduction we would have achieved by our sacrifice.

The real smokescreen is the politically inspired, media hyped notion that _our_ so called 'gas guzzlers' are responsible for global warming.

Another useless statistic being that I could drive Grumble around the circumference of the globe and not pollute the planet anywhere near as much as flying to Paris and back for a romantic weekend.

Well, in order for politicians and media to keep their jobs, there has to be a continuous stream of problems to scare us with and solutions to soothe us with. Neither need to be real, we can have real problems with fake solutions, as long as those solutions don't have politically damaging victims, and let's face it, we're not.

All the major Stoke potteries have moved some of their production overseas.

Royal Doulton is the only one of them to have shut down all its Stoke manufacturing operations.

Wedgewood, Spode, Port Merrion and etc all still have factories in Stoke but on a much smaller scale, and, of course, the studio potteries' suppliers like Studiocraft are still there.

That's very well put.

Richard

Airliners are, passenger-mile for passenger-mile, more than competitive on long flights. London-Paris is dragged down by the time spent stooging around in the aviation equivalent of urban traffic.

Ships and trains can still beat them.

The aircraft does burn more fuel per mile than a car. It also carries more people.

Wedgewood move some/most bare plate production to Korea (might have been Malasia), re-importing them for decoration. As my mother observed (being something of a Wedgewood fan) "I can get cheaper Far Eastern plates in Tesco..."

Royal Doulton have largely vanished, and lost the "Royal" it seems.

Richard