Inside the Skoda factory that's bigger than Monaco

Small car, not small hall, it perhaps doesn’t need to be said. Small car bodies enter the hall on dollies fresh from the paint shop, where each one has already spent 11 hours. Before that, body and chassis components are welded together elsewhere on site in an 85%-robotised, automated plant.

Prior to that, their body panels were pressed here too. And before that, even the tooling for the presses was designed and machined here. Mladá Boleslav has hundreds of suppliers but it is unequivocally not just an assembly plant.

It’s after entry to this assembly hall that Skodas really start to take shape, though. The doors have been painted at the same time as the body but they’re removed and separated from the shell because the production line isn’t wide enough for the cars to roll along them with the doors open. Workers get better access to the interior this way too, and the right closures will be reunited with the right body further down the line.

Doorless cars, with their respective powertrains yet to be fitted, slip seamlessly onto the line and the first work station. Each station has a cycle that lasts for one minute before the cars scooch on to the next station. There are three eight-hour shifts in a day, with a target of 440 cars to be made each shift.

As we visit, it’s 45 minutes into the 2pm-10pm shift and monitors in aisles say that, as per target, 43 cars have been produced so far. In contrast to the welding or paint shops, this final assembly is accomplished mostly by hand.

Teams of six to eight workers beaver around each station and each of them has a team leader who will have been voted in by the rest of them. Different crews are dressed in different T-shirts: Skoda staff wear green sleeves, blue tees represent agency staff, orange is worn by logistics personnel and red denotes maintenance staff. Skoda will hope it doesn’t require too many of those. Shutting the factory would be tremendously expensive.

Breaks, then, are rather better if scheduled. There’s a half-hour break during each shift but, while there is a canteen (I couldn’t tell you if it serves whatever the local equivalent of Volkswagen’s currywurst is), the size of the place means that most of the workers wouldn’t be able to walk there and back, let alone stop to eat, within the half hour.

Instead, there are multiple breakout rooms dotted around the site, more than 2000 vending machines, plus 200 small shops, so they can maximise rest time. Despite rubberised floors to ease stress on joints, specialist chairs or lifting equipment, electric wrenches and more, putting cars together remains hard work.

People are treated much better than they used to be, of course. Robots or machines are there to assist carrying and installing heavy items like wheels and radiators (both towards the end of the assembly process), but still, the average age of the worker is only 38.

Wages, though, are the highest for manual labour in the Czech Republic and, as with so many industrial towns, the plant and city effectively exist as one entity – even an ancient local cemetery lives entirely within the factory compound, so visitors need a pass to gain access.

And with that integration between work and life, as in British steel cities, comes an immense pride in local productivity. High-school children come on work experience here, those who obtain jobs can lease a Skoda aged 18, and Skoda owns the city’s university too.

The success of either part of Mladá Boleslav, you suspect, depends on the relative fortunes of the other. That there’s a three-month waiting list for a Skoda suggests that, at the moment, both work and play in Mladá Boleslav are successful. Each Skoda begins its life in the assembly hall with a printed sheet (a ‘birth certificate’) hanging from its open bonnet when it enters the line.

Every car has an end customer before production starts, who has picked the specification that hangs from the sheet, letting the workers know what needs to be fitted. It should be straightforward. Skoda operates a just-in-time/sequence production line and the parts that are ready to fit ought to match the ones that are supposed to be fitted: the checklist is precisely that.

There are only four hours’ worth of parts on site. The right bits, for the right cars, will have been delivered by small manned tow trucks or GPS-enabled robotic trolleys to each station.

Perhaps the most significant part of the assembly process is called the wedding. Maybe, as with the birth certificate, there’s a natural tendency for anthropomorphism (because build sheet or vehicle spec would surely do fine). But I’ve heard the ‘wedding’ process named ‘the marriage’ in other car plants too.

It’s when the vehicle body, which has had most of its interior and electrics already added, meets the powertrain – engine and gearbox here, front and rear axles and exhaust; or motor and battery, too, in the big car assembly hall, where ICE and BEV cars roll along the same line. Shiny bits meet oily bits, I suppose.

These drivetrains have entered the hall from another side of the building to the bodies. The Volkswagen Group’s 1.0-litre to 1.6-litre petrol engines are made in this factory and then exported to other group facilities around the world. And you can spot whether a car will have a manual or a dual-clutch automatic transmission even before the gearstick is fitted because it will have either one (automatic) or two (manual) gear cables sprouting from the lever.

As the two constituent parts of the car come together, the body and running gear wedding process takes two minutes rather than one, so the assembly line splits to become two stations instead of a single one at this point.

Bodies conveyed at head height have running gear raised up to meet them. Then workers set about the undersides with electric torque wrenches. These, and you’ll see them everywhere, play a significant part of the drive for consistency in quality, and accountability.

Each torque wrench records which nut it’s tightening, to which torque it’s tightened, and when the operation was performed. Later, if any quality issues are discovered, Skoda will know which batch of other cars could be affected, and how to fix the issue at source. 

There are multiple calibrating machines dotted about the assembly hall to keep all tools within tolerance; plates to stand on and dissipate static electricity, too, to prevent blowing any vulnerable electronics. After the wedding comes one of the most automated parts of the assembly.

Handheld torque wrenches aren’t up to applying the strength needed to tighten the biggest fixings connecting body and running gear together, because they need to be torqued to, well, I don’t know, so let’s call it fully tight. So workers stand clear while robots spear up from underneath to crank everything into the position it will stay in for the vehicle’s lifetime.

It’s after this point – still shorn of wheels, much of the insides, radiators, bumpers and more – that cars really take shape and can be identified as what they are. The cars could be going to any of 98 different countries, and for some of those it will be possible for those familiar with manufacture to tell which country, because they will meet specific regulatory requirements.

After the wheels and bumpers have been fitted, interior and electrical components are connected and tested and only then are the doors reattached and fluids filled. Unusually, once it’s complete, every single one of Skoda’s cars is run around a short test track outside the production hall. Not a random selection from the line. Every. Single. Car.

Granted, the track is not like the Millbrook hill route or anything, but a short sequence of different surfaces and rumble strips. Not all cars get signed off. Those that show rattles or squeaks are put aside for rectification. This isn’t unusual in a car factory. None is ever perfect, although the pass rates would be so close to 100% that the failure percentage is negligible.