Usenet isn't big enough to list all the reasons why BL built rubbish.
I first worked in there around the mid 80s, when Honda was just starting to make improvements. I never had much to do with Ford, so most of the other car plants I went into were the new-build Japanese plants. Even so, BL was _primitive_ in a manner that was reminiscent of a Victorian steam engine manufactory, more than a car plant.
Obviously not including Swindon, where the GWR engine assembly shop was using better optical alignment tools in the '20s than we had in the press shop in the '90s.
There was just an attitude of utter cluelesness about most of management. I did a lot of work on SPC systems - most BL managers were ignorant, uninterested and simply had a "not my problem" to innovations like this. They'd make lip service of supporting them, but few could be _bothered_ to understand what the new approach was about, so they'd mis-use or otherwise break it. SPC (Statistical Process Control) is a technique that uses gauging and statistics to _avoid_ making out-of-spec components, not just to detect them afterwards. As it relies on analysing trends, not surprisingly it's dependent on monitoring parts in the order they're being produced. I remember one system for assembling diff components where the parts were being stacked in a cage pallet during transfer between lines - which reverses the order in batches of 125! (you load them from the bottom, you use them from the top) Not surprisingly the stats for that process never really made much sense, but of course the charts all went up on the board just the same. Pure Cargo-Cult by people who couldn't get off their arses to understand what they were doing.