It sounds absurd to be surprised at how automated the process of car production is these days, but that was my reaction when I toured BMW’s plant making Series 3 cars in Munich today.

It has been more than 10 years since I went round a vehicle plant, so I took the opportunity on a visit to Munich to visit the one that which stands on the site where BMW first made aircraft engines in 1917.

About 9,000 people work at the plant, which only turns out about 900 or so cars a day - these are, after all, premium cars and not volume models - but most of the work is done by robots.

In the body shop, where the stamped metal sheets are welded together into car bodies, for example, about 97 per cent of the task is done by 650 robots. The remaining three percent consists of changing copper welding tips and placing stamped sheets where the robots can pick them up.

BMW does not allow visitors to take photographs inside the plant, which is a pity because I would otherwise have posted a shot of the intricate dance of the robots, which is quite a sight.

The robots, which are made by Kuka and ABB, are painted orange and tilt and twist on several axes as the metal parts are threaded in and out, glued and welded. BMW is proud of a station at which the completed bodies get welded by 12 robots at once, said to be more than its rivals manage.

Even on the assembly line, the powertrains and bodies are brought together (in a process called “marriage”) by robots and human intervention is limited to jobs such as tightening some bolts and threading in the electrics. Humans still make the car seats, although that too is done by robots at other BMW plants.

That accounts for the fact that far fewer people work in vehicle plants than in the past, despite their image of being filled with people. General Motors, for example, now employs only 48,000 US manual workers, down from 114,000 three years ago.

Robots have been in use for about three decades and I recall the 1979 British television advertisement for the Fiat Strada which boasted of them being “hand-built by robots”.

There is a, possibly apocryphal, story that when Hugh Hudson, the director of the Fiat Strada spot, arrived in Turin for the filming, his crew came across a protest by workers at their jobs being taken over by machines. That fight has long been lost.

October 29, 2009 4:45pm in Autos | Comment