Piece by piece… but each part identical to the one before it

Humanity is created by putting people together; the ocean exists because drops make it up; the smallest protein is a jigsaw of molecules. At the beginning of time, something assembled atoms together and breathed in human or marine life to that molecule. Pray, what is a car if not an assembly of atoms?

We believe the Industrial Revolution changed everything, and in part it did. Metal techniques such as those employed by Gustav Eiffel in the Victorian era changed architecture and engineering forever. The use of joinable materials lighter than stone and stronger than wood changed the world: buildings with almost no height limit, bridges that were previously impossible to make, metal vehicles on wheels. In our Rubí Automotive factories, parts or blocks of previously assembled parts were moved to other sites to manufacture the finished product. Before the Parisian tower (1889), the largest metal structure in the world had already been erected in record time in London: the Crystal Palace (1851). Piece by piece.

In the automotive sector, and especially in our Rubí Automotive plants, we are heirs to the Industrial Revolution but also to a much older, scientific and systematic way of doing things. The way humans started creating large social structures for the benefit of all.

Wherever we look, on any page of human history, there is a technical challenge overcome. In 1755, an earthquake followed by fire and a tsunami in Lisbon disintegrated the Portuguese capital and left more than 100,000 dead. For the first time in history, science created modern urban
planning and standardised components for hundreds of dwellings. Parts or assembled blocks (such as door and window frames and earthquake-resistant structural elements) were mass-produced in a factory and installed on-site. Does this sound familiar, dear reader? Spare parts began to be stocked, something that still causes companies like ours to rack our brains. Whilst manufacturing spare parts for car brands was our main activity in the mid-sixties (under the Lopar commercial name), today we manufacture components directly for the factories of industry giants.

We can even go further back in time. 3,000 years ago, the Egyptians already had quality inspectors supervising the work of craftsmen working on the pyramids. Interior painters passed rigorous examinations to normalise and unify aesthetic criteria. This is why we are still surprised by how similar plenty of hieroglyphs are, despite being miles or centuries apart. When visiting Rubí Automotive, anyone can see how important our Laboratory and our Quality Departments are in our plants.

And we can go even further back to the beginning of time in terms of written history. It so happens that the first official written document was a code of rules, including rules to be followed by the engineers of the time. We are talking about the Code of Hammurabi, a stone tablet written by the Babylonian of Mesopotamia some 5,000 years ago. It states the importance of complying with laws, rules and requirements to guarantee peaceful coexistence, and contains the punishments applicable to different code violations. Rubí Automotive is driven by the human need to create complex elements that improve the quality of life of societies.