Nissan Car factory

On Thursday we got the joys of a 6am start followed by an even more joyous 8 hours on a bus for our trip to the Sunderland based Nissan car factory. We arrived at the GINORMOUS factory and were greeted by a jolly retired Nissan worker and kited up in hi-vis vests, hard caps, safety glasses and given a fun headset ready for our guided tour.

The tour lasted 3 hours and we apparently walked over 3 miles whilst being shown the ins and outs of the world of Nissan- it was pretty exhausting but very interesting.

As we first walked into the body shop there were silver shells of cars on a roller coaster type contraption all moving towards us ready to get painted- quite a surprising sight! We then were walked through the whole process of construction of the cars from the tiniest fiddly parts and precise robotic welding to the guys who manually added in the dashboards and fitted the glass. It was amazing to see the cars come to life and the speed and accuracy of the workers on the factory floor, they had to move so quick as the conveyor belt production line moved along. On average each employee had around 30 -60 seconds to complete their task before moving on to the next one!

One of the things I found funny was seeing the workers driving about in the cars at the end. The thorough testing that the cars went through was really interesting to watch.

Some other surprising facts were that the factory now produces more cars in one week than in did in the whole of its first year of production and that when the machines breakdown the maintenance of them costs Nissan £3,000 per minute!!! Not to mention the fact that after the cars are painted they get polished with ostrich feathers!!!!

It was pretty cool and really surreal to see the whole process from start to finish of the making of these cars. It was great to get a feel for factory work and get access to a huge company’s production line. It made me feel quite excited at the prospect that after graduating we could be the people behind an amazing design and see as our visions come to life on such a large scale as that!