90 Years on the Production Line

The process of assembling a car from individual components is a fantastic spectacle in which everyone and every machine has a clearly defined place. Cars were initially assembled manually and were very expensive. In the first few decades of the 20th century, manufacturers started looking for ways of making cars cheaper in order to spread the customer net.

Some thought the solution would be to invent some brilliantly low-cost engineering design. In the end, though, the key lay in one of the basic rules of economics: high production quantities make products cheaper. The answer, then, was conveyor belt production, and the Mladá Boleslav plant launched its first conveyor belt system 90 years ago.

Compared to the present, the numbers of cars sold in what is today the Czech Republic were very low. For example, over the first three months of 1925, the year Laurin & Klement became part of the Škoda Plzeň group, cars sold in Prague included 17 Laurin & Klements, 59 Pragas and 31 Tatras, to name just the best-selling brands. In late 1925, there were 12,580 registered passenger cars in what is today the Czech Republic according to research reports by Masaryk University in Brno. Today that figure stands at over 5.6 million.

Maintaining automotive production when volumes were so low was possible only thanks to the government’s protective policy that limited imports of foreign-made cars into Czechoslovakia. Yet Václav Klement, one of the company founders, knew how to make the business grow. Carefully monitoring international competitors, he saw that some of them were starting to use conveyor belt systems. To do the same thing, L&K needed major investment, and that was one of the reasons why the brand teamed up with ŠKODA.

The first step towards series production was a new four-storey body shop built in Mladá Boleslav. Completed in 1926, this new centre consisted of a storeroom in the basement, the production of wooden bodywork components on the ground floor, and upholstery and saddlery workshops on the first floor. On the second floor, wooden components were assembled to form whole car bodies, which were then metal-plated on the third floor and painted on the fourth.

This system, however, just gave a foretaste of conveyor belt capabilities. In April 1928, the Company lay the foundations for another building. Named Mechanics, this was a hall 200 metres in length and 130 metres wide. Construction was completed shortly before the end of 1928, and the site was put into operation in 1929. The building was used to assemble chassis and produce engines and gearboxes. The two buildings were subsequently interconnected – bodies finished on the fourth floor of the body shop were transported via a bridge to the Mechanics building, where the engines and chassis were mounted. This meant that the conveyor belt production system was complete, making ŠKODA one of the world’s first automakers to produce cars precisely yet cheaply. That was a heavy blow for all local competitors, and the company soon wielded absolute market dominance. In 1930, the production line was able to produce 25 vehicles a day. ŠKODA made a few tweaks and launched three-shift operations to increase daily capacity to 85 vehicles. The foundations for today’s success were thus laid 90 years ago.

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How important are today’s conveyor belt systems in car production? Why can’t we do without them?
You are right in saying there is no real substitute for conveyor belt production. It is a fully-fledged mechanism that enables us to produce large volumes of cars within a short span of time, even with relatively low-skilled staff. The sequence in which the cars are arranged on the assembly line is fixed, and they pass through standardised points where they undergo identical operations specific to the model concerned. In this way, the whole car assembly process is divided into a number of small actions, each performed by the same people and the same machines. This ensures that each car is produced to the same standard. Conveyor belt production is more than just assembly: it is essentially a logistics system in which materials and parts are always delivered to the same spot and exactly when needed on the line.