We are not your typical car manufacturer...
This will become clear well before you step through the doors of the Pembleton factory; meandering through the rural Worcestershire lanes to our secluded HQ you'll start to wonder whether you're going to the right place. When you pull up to the 400-year-old oak barn remodelled as our showroom, you'll realise there won't be any robots assembling vehicles in clinical, automated assembly lines, each and every bespoke Pembleton is lovingly hand-crafted to an exacting specification over the course of several weeks in our charming workshops.
As you step into the modest workshops you're greeted by walls laden with tools and jigs wearing the patina of age and hard use. Though they make for an interesting decor, each one is still used on a daily basis in our bespoke car-building process.
Still manufactured on the same site as the very first Pembleton, each car is meticulously hand-built to order by an expert team of craftspeople. Practising some of the oldest techniques in the industry, we’re obsessed with attention to detail, and dedicated to perfection.
Every chassis is hand-fabricated using a precise jig before being draped in a coach-built and hand-riveted aluminium body.
Fun Fact: a Pembleton T24 uses 870 hand pulled rivets, and a Pembleton V-Sport uses 822
We use a combination of oak and beech toolings to form the aluminium into shape as well as hand-rolling, fly-pressing, shrinking, stretching and hammering to achieve the striking hand-built coachwork. The brass cowls that adorn the front of the bonnet and house the Pembleton badge still proudly display their hand-spun ring markings as an ode to the work that has gone into spinning each one.
Once the car is fully bodied, a painstaking process that takes weeks to execute and years to perfect, we're able to assemble the car. This is the satisfying part where a bare fuselage comes to life as a Pembleton. The cars then go through the meticulous IVA inspection followed by
an even more detailed pre delivery inspection and set-up ready for polishing pre hand-over.
Unlike a traditional assembly line, each car remains in one location for the duration of its build. We build 5 cars at anyone time to optimise this process all whilst being monitored through our own developed digital manufacturing tracking program, this ensures each car is built to a strict deadline.
Almost every component is unique to Pembleton and more often than not hand-built in-house. But when it's more efficient to do so, we work closely with a number of local engineering firms and suppliers to produce our bespoke designs just for us.
This post offers a glimpse behind the scenes to what goes into every bespoke Pembleton build. Whilst we don't offer factory tours, we'd love to get you behind the wheel and book a test drive. We will always offer to show you around the workshops when you visit, to see for yourself the attention to detail that goes into every element of a Pembleton.
As we look forward into 2025, we have gained planning permission and started construction of a brand new purpose built facility on the same site as our current workshops. The new space will be vastly improved and specialised when compared to our existing workshops and being on the same site, will maintain the rural and rustic charm. It will facilitate business growth affording us increased space to build more cars at a faster rate with a fully optimised hand-manufacturing process.
If you're still dreaming of ownership, but want an escape from reality, heres a snippet of Pembleton ownership caught on video camera...
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