Inside the Skoda factory that’s bigger than Monaco

Skoda’s manufacturing plant is the size of Monaco – 4000 cars are made here every day

The beating heart of Skoda’s global operations is mind-boggling in both sheer scale and choreographed detail

I don’t quite catch the number on which one of the 13 gates that lead into Skoda’s Mladá Boleslav factory we enter by. But as we do, we drive into a car plant that’s bigger than Monaco.
Not just this Czech city but this very site has been home to Skoda – or Laurin & Klement as it was in 1895 – for 130 years.
Today, the original factory buildings house a museum and cafe. There are exposed beams and wooden floors and it’s atmospheric in a way that is of course impossible to replicate in the vastness of a facility that can turn out up to 4000 cars a day. In 1895, around 15,000 people lived in the town. Today, nearly 30,000 of the 40,000-plus work at Skoda alone.
On the approach road to whichever gate it is, cranes behind high fences to our left lift steel scraps and offcuts into crushers fo