The £300m site extension will expand Bespoke and Coachbuild capabilities, driven by a 10% increase in Bespoke content value per motor car year-on-year, and support future EV production.
Rolls Royce says the extension is primarily to provide the space needed to meet the increasing demand for Bespoke and Coachbuild commissions, but will also allow for renewal of key facilities, including a new paint shop, and support preparing the manufacturing facility for the company’s transition to an all-battery electric vehicle (BEV) future.
A company spokesman noted that in the long term this could add more jobs (the plant currently employs 2500 workers), but that the expansion is not intended to increase volume but rather to enable more complex Bespoke commissions to be undertaken.
He added that Bespoke is an integrated part of the production operations with every Rolls-Royce being built having has some sort of Bespoke element or feature and that this requires a well-planned production scheme for all 44 stations along the assembly line.
He observed that for Bespoke, a lot of development and production of design and features takes place in advance of the assembly – meaning that the finished Bespoke features/parts are installed as the vehicle moves down the production line.
All models (ICE: Phantom, Ghost and Cullinan, BEV: Spectre) are assembled on a single 190-meter line, and vehicle build process takes a maximum of 1.5 days or 3 shifts from launch to finish.
The company has already been optimising and expanding the number of workstations. For example, the number of stations for the Starlight headliner has increased from 4 to 17 since this option was introduced in 2014. Seat assembly has been moved from an elevated skywalk to the shop floor to create a more efficient production process. The leather shop sews together by hand the seat covers (also with Bespoke features) which are then applied to the skeletal seat – on the shop floor.
Although the Bespoke options require a high level of skilled handcrafting, these operations are now being supported by digital systems. For example, a digital-steered cutting machine optimises the cutting of all hides used in the production for the interior.
Planning permission to extend the Goodwood facility was granted in 2024 and the company says that this £300m investment is the single largest injection of capital since the plant opened on 1 January 2003.
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