Tag: VDL Nedcar

MINI has announced it will be building the new F56 MINI hatch at the VDL Nedcar plant in Born, the Netherlands. Plant Oxford will remain as the focal point for MINI production, with VDL Nedcar brought on board to provide additional capacity.

“Contract production is a vital flexibility tool for us, and our experience gathered over the past ten years has been nothing but positive,” said Dr Klaus Draeger, BMW AG’s Board Member Purchasing and Supplier Network. “Splitting production of the new MINI Hatch between Oxford and Born will give our global production network additional leeway.

“The MINI brand is showing substantial growth. This is why we need additional, external production capacity on top of the capacity of the MINI plant in Oxford which stands at about 260,000 units per year in the medium term. VDL Nedcar has many years of experience in producing high quality vehicles, so the company is an ideal partner for us.”

MINIs will begin to roll off the VDL Nedcar production line in a few months. It will be the first time under BMW’s ownership the hatch has been built outside of Oxford.

VDL Nedcar joins MSF in Austria who have built over 125,000 Countryman and Paceman models for MINI. Almost 2.8 million MINI vehicles have been made since BMW relaunched the brand in 2001.

The next-generation MINI is getting closer to its late-2013 launch and heavily disguised Cooper S (above) and Cooper (below) models have been spied in Germany. These are likely to be pre-production models, which started rolling down the line in April.

Longer and wider than the current R56 MINI, the new model will be the first to have a conventional instrument cluster; forever consigning the large centrally-mounted speedometer to the history books.

The Cooper S and JCW models will still use a turbocharged 1.6 litre engine, but lower-spec F56 MINIs will use three cylinder units developed by BMW.

MINI is continuing its global march from niche player to relative volume seller with word that a production facility in China is now on the cards. The Shenyang Plant is expected to commence production in 2015 and is slated to build MINIs and front-wheel drive BMWs destined for Asian markets.

At the moment Countrymans are built by Magna Styer in Austria and NedCar in the Netherlands is signed up to build F56 MINIs as well.

We rather liked it when all MINIs came from Oxford and they had stupidly sized speedos in the middle of the dash and were genuinely different to their competition. Now we’re alert, and maybe even alarmed, at the way BMW is slowly stripping away some of the character traits that made a MINI a MINI.

Please, BMW, don’t dilute the MINI brand down so much that it becomes just another BMW product.

[Source: WCF & Autocar]