ma jan 02, 2006 15:47
King (oud-technisch directeur Rover) in interview over kwaliteit.
CSK: I tell you what I want to put to you about the whole story, is that what was really done wrong all the way through BL was a disrespect for the customer, and neglect of real quality and reliability. That was the big thing, and it was consistent. The Rover Company was not guilty of it – the original Rover Company was desperately keen to make good motorcars, and they did listen to the customer all the time. Ever since, they thought that the customers were idiots, who bought things regardless.
CSK: What happened was that they decided that it was going to have big volume, so built the ruddy great factory at Solihull and then there was a lot of stuff going on about how many hours it should take to build a motorcar, and the Austin-Morris people came up with the figure that we should build SD1 in 23 hours. So I think largely on the basis of that, there was this invasion of Rover, in the way the Normans invaded England, or how Triumph invaded BMC at one time. So, the car wasn’t made by the Rover people at all, but by the Austin Morris invasion team.
CSK: Well, it started off being engineered as a Rover product, but it wasn’t made as Rover product at all! It was just awful.
CSK: The bodies were built very badly, too. The other thing that happened was that the paint plant was a disaster, too – what happened was that they made the bodies badly, then shipped them across to Solihull, then painted them in a plant with a new acrylic paint process, which was very sensitive to the amount of time it was baked at. If you baked it too long, it became brittle… and then, when they put the cars together, the paint was brittle and then they didn’t fit right, and so they bashed them, and it cracked the paint.
If you’re going to have a company which is to be successful in the long term you’ve got to make things properly because otherwise, you’re taking a lot of very expensive material and turning it into rubbish. Something like three quarters of the turn over of a car company goes straight out to the suppliers in order to buy stuff in, but if after spending all that money you bring the stuff in you turn it into something that doesn’t work very well, it is a complete disaster.