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Welcome to Business Daily from the BBC World Service. I'm John Lawrenson.

Today, I'm in the country that makes the highest number of cars per capita in the world.

We have a Volkswagen, Kia, Stelantis, Jaguar, and Rover and Volvo,

and these guys are building 10 different brands in Slovakia.

When this East European country was part of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic,

the cars it made there were, by Western standards, poorly finished, noisy, thirsty and slow.

But after the Velvet Revolution ended communist rule,

and the Czechs and Slovaks agreed to split into two independent countries,

Volkswagen bought and overhauled the old Czechoslovak carmaker Skoda,

and other foreign automobile manufacturers started investing here too.

Now Slovakia makes almost a million cars a year.

Soon, with Volvo opening a factory here in 2027, it'll be a quarter of a million more.

Extraordinary for a country of 5 million people.

I like the fact that thanks to that, the production, supports our society.

We'll be taking apart the motor of the Slovak car industry to see how it works.

Coming up in Business Daily from the BBC.

Surrounded by mountains covered in snow, in a huge factory of corrugated grey-green metal, a lift lowers the steel bodies of cars onto the start of an assembly line.

They'd just been welded together by robots, 690 of whom work in this factory. Now, an army of

human workers in red trousers and white t-shirts will transform these steel shells into finished

cars, one of which drives off the end of the assembly line every minute, flashing its headlights.

This is the European factory of the Korean car manufacturer Kia,

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