Exploring In The Key Of X

Travelling through the tame and not-so-tame parts of South Africa with the new BMW X3.

- Daryl Lee

To say that my time in South Africa exposed me to a host of rather special experiences would be selling the country short. Of course, a good deal of those experiences came courtesy of BMW. Well, not directly, but since I was a guest of the carmaker driving its made-in-country X3 mid-sized SUV, it would be churlish not to give it due credit. I’ve never experienced the joys of suffering a punctured tyre while out on the road. While in South Africa, I picked up a pair of them… at the same time.

In all fairness, it was largely my fault.

Apparently, roadgoing 20-inch rubber doesn’t like it very much when you’re doing your best rally driver impression charging hard along gravel roads.

Anyway – and this is most definitely a uniquely BMW experience – I was given a behind-the-scenes look at how BMW’s Rosslyn plant works. Roughly an hour’s drive our of Johannesburg lies a car factory that has been steadily producing BMWs for 45 years. Specifically, the soon-to-be replaced 3 Series, and since April 2018, the X3. Of the over 18,000 produced since then, I had the privilege of driving one from Johannesburg’s OR Tambo International Airport. If you haven’t yet been to a modern car factory like BMW’s plant in Rosslyn, you’d be surprised to find how incredibly clean it is, and how few humans there are working on the assembly line. Part of the factory’s upgrading works over the past three years included the addition of a slew of robots. Over 300 of them reside in the body shop alone (the part of the production process that assembles the bodyshell), and the plant’s spray booth is now 100 per cent automated.