New Nissan Qashqai to be designed & built in the UK

Nissan Qashqai - 1,000,000 already built in Sunderland

The Nissan Qashqai created the crossover niche almost single-handedly, and has gone on to be Nissan’s best-selling model. Now in its facelifted iteration, the Qashqai has been a huge money-spinner for Nissan.

Fortunately for UK PLC, the Nissan Qashqai is built in the UK – in Nissan’s Sunderland plant – where a million Qashqais have been built, with 80% going for export.

Those figures are big numbers, with some 6,000 UK jobs reliant on the Qashqai and over 80% of parts for the Qashqai sourced from more than 200 UK suppliers.

So it will have come as a relief to the workforce in Sunderland – and to Nissan’s UK suppliers – that the next Nissan Qashqai will not only be designed in the UK but will continue to be built in Sunderland.

Nissan are to invest £192 million to develop and build the new Qashqai in Britain. The Qashqai will be styled at Nissan’s European Design Centre in Paddington before Nissan’s engineers in Cranfield take over, with the completed design being bolted together for Nissan’s world market in Sunderland.

Nissan boss, Carlos Ghosn, speaking outside 10 Downing Street said:

The UK has been a cornerstone of Nissan manufacturing since 1986, with the Sunderland plant setting important benchmarks for quality and efficiency in Europe and around the world. It’s the home of the Qashqai, one of Nissan’s biggest product successes. And as Nissan’s leadership in sustainable transportation grows, the plant will become one of the pillars of our zero-emission manufacturing.

That means not just the £192 million investment in the Qashqai in the UK, but also a further £420 million pumped in to the Sunderland plant to produce the Nissan LEAF from 2013 and a new factory to churn out lithium-ion batteries for Renault and Nissan from next year.

Isn’t it heart warming to see investment in manufacturing in the UK on the up?

By Cars UK