Officially, VDL Nedcar’s contract with BMW ends on March 1st, 2024. Still, the curtain drops definitively this Friday with the last MINI, a silver-grey cabrio, rolling off the production line in Born (Netherlands).

On Thursday, the main assembly line came to a halt; on Friday, on three smaller lines, the finishing touch on the last cars is done, closing 57 years of car building. Among the 2,000 people losing their jobs, some 700 Belgian cross-border workers. The redundancies come on top of the thousand interim workers and 500 permanent staff that have already left.

700 Belgian cross-border workers

For the Belgian cross-border workers who lose their jobs – sometimes for the second time, as many came from Ford Genk, which closed ten years ago – two additional information days will be held next week, ACV union man Jos Poukens told Het Belang van Limburg.

January 17 was the moment of truth for 2,000 employees of Dutch contract builder VDL Nedcar in Born, as the company summoned everybody to show up and get to know the end day of their work. The employees were informed department by department and could get answers to their questions and moral support in a so-called ‘job center’.

At that time, VDL said only 474 would escape the hatchet, as it needed the in-house expertise to maintain the factory and restart it in 2026. Now, the unions fear even these 474 won’t escape the hatchet.

The last gleam of hope

The last gleam of hope vanished of starting up again as the British Gordon Murray Automotive Group pulled out of the so-called L60 project. Details were never given, but it was assumed Nedcar would build two electric premium SUVs with a 300,000-euro price tag.

In July 2023, Dutch contract car manufacturer Nedcar said it had signed a new declaration of intent with a new non-disclosed client to assemble or build cars again in Born near the Belgian border from 2026. No names of potential new clients were given, but rumors stated this could be Chinese BYD or the group of British designers Gordon Murray that builds exclusive sports cars today.

Damp squib

Even now, VDL perseveres that it is still talking with possible candidates to restart car assembly as a contract builder within two or four years. But as these ‘talks’ in the past always turned out to be a damp squib, the workers don’t believe this will really happen.

There will be no extra jobs in VDL’s new Mobility Innovation Center for the 2,000 thrown out into the street today. VDL Nedcar struck a deal with… BMW to assemble 125,000 battery packs in that center between 2024 and 2035.

VDL CEO Willem van der Leegte saw this as ‘a flying start’ for its new branch where ‘sustainable mobility solutions’ are developed. Here, research is done into autonomous vehicles for German Schaeffler, among others.

57 years of history

In its 57-year history, Nedcar which was initially set up with heavy government subsidies to reemploy the miners who lost their jobs – has built cars for Daf, Volvo, Mitsubishi, Mini, and BMW. In its top years, the factory produced up to 260,000 annually with 9,000 employees.

The year Ford Genk closed, in 2014, the Van der Leegte family bought the factory in Born, which was already threatened to close permanently for one symbolic euro. The contract with BMW, which was looking for extra production capacity for the MINI and later the BMW X1, was a life-support system for the next ten years.

Until BMW decided it had enough production capacity to build all cars itself in-house. Consequently, the BMW robots in Born will now be moved back to the ‘motherhouse’.