Biography|Oliver Zipse — The Cowley Works He Ran as MINI Plant Manager

People treat Zipse's production years as a Munich planning job.

For two years the factory he ran was this one.

BMW's official curriculum lists him as managing director of Plant Oxford in 2007 and 2008.

The plant sits in Cowley, off the eastern bypass at OX4 6NL, on ground that has built cars since the 1913 Morris works.

The classic Mini left these halls in 1959.

BMW bought Rover in 1994, kept the MINI name, and put a new MINI back into production here in 2001.

Zipse arrived as plant manager six years later.

He was already inside the company: trainee in 1991, then development and production posts in Munich and South Africa.

Oxford was the first time the CV gave him a whole works.

After 2008 he went back to Munich as head of technical planning, then corporate planning and product strategy, then the production seat on the management board in May 2015.

The plant still runs public tours and keeps a small museum in one of the older site buildings.

A visitor stands at a working factory, not a replica campus.

The pin is the Cowley works he was hired to run, not the later chair in the four-cylinder tower.

Photo: MINI Manufacturing Centre, Cowley, 19 May 2012. Lobster1, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.