Nissan to secure UK’s largest car plant with two new EV models
Japanese carmaker expected to unveil plan to build replacements for its Qashqai and Juke crossover cars with £1bn investment
Nissan is expected to announce it will build two new electric models in Sunderland, securing the future of the UK’s largest car factory.
The Japanese carmaker will build replacements for its Qashqai and Juke crossover cars, according to Sky which first reported the news.
Investment in the factory could reach as much as £1bn, with significant government subsidy expected.
It comes after the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, announced £2bn of government support on Wednesday for investments in zero-emission technology in the UK’s automotive sector. Hunt said in his autumn statement that the measure had been “warmly welcomed by Nissan and Toyota”, both of which have large factories in Britain.
The investment will be welcomed by the UK car industry, as well as the factory’s 6,000 workers. It follows recent investment announcements from India’s Tata, which will build a £4bn battery factory to supply Jaguar and Land Rover, and BMW, which is spending £600m to upgrade its factory to build electric Mini cars.
The Sunderland plant is Britain’s single largest car factory, capable of making 600,000 cars a year at maximum capacity. However, its output has been significantly lower in recent years as the car industry has struggled with Brexit uncertainty, followed by the coronavirus pandemic and consequent supply chain problems.
The plant makes the petrol models of the Qashqai and Juke, as well as the electric Nissan Leaf. It receives batteries from a factory next door, run by Chinese-owned AESC, that it previously owned.
The AESC factory can make batteries with about 2 gigawatt hours (GWh) of capacity a year, but it is building much larger facilities that will aim to produce 9GWh by 2024, and eventually 38GWh, enough to make roughly 600,000 car batteries a year.
Nissan had already announced in 2021 that Sunderland would be an electric vehicles hub, but it has not so far outlined what models it will build there.
The Leaf was for a time one of the world’s leading electric cars, starting production in Sunderland in 2010. However, Nissan did not build on its early lead, and was overtaken by other carmakers in the move to electric technology.
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However, Nissan has pledged to go all-electric in Europe by 2030, and said it would push ahead with the switch in the UK despite Rishi Sunak’s decision in September to push back a ban on petrol and diesel cars by 2035.
A Nissan spokesperson said: “We do not comment on rumours and speculation.”