Nissan to build the Kicks at Sunderland, with no extra jobs

Nissan will spend £170 million to build the second-generation Kicks at Sunderland. The car is a hybrid. It is already made in Japan, Mexico and Brazil. In Britain it would sit on the same site as the Qashqai, the Juke and the Leaf. The company said the plan does not create jobs and does not change the shift pattern. It is meant to help keep the jobs that are already there.

There is no date for the first car. The BBC reported that Nissan did not give one. A sum without a start of production is a model allocation, not a volume plan. Anyone pricing tooling into Wearside on the back of this announcement is pricing a derivative whose year is still blank.

£170m

Nissan’s figure for the Kicks at Sunderland

6,000

People on the site, about

Half

Capacity the plant is running at, per the BBC

None

New jobs, and no change of shift

The hall is already half empty

Sunderland employs about 6,000 people and is running at about half capacity. Earlier this year Nissan merged two production lines on the site. A plant that has just taken a line out does not need a press release to explain what the next model is for. It needs something to put on the line that remains. The Kicks is that something, if it arrives, and at a scale Nissan has not stated.

The same week, the company was still in talks with Chery about building Chinese cars at Sunderland, to use more of the plant. Nissan confirmed the talks were continuing. A second manufacturer on the site is a different industrial fact from a tenth Nissan model. One fills a badge. The other fills hours. Neither has a date.

Earlier this year Nissan said it would cut 900 jobs in Europe, including part of a warehouse in Barcelona, and that cars for the Nordic countries would be imported rather than held there. Sunderland is being given a model in the middle of a European cut, not at the start of a hiring round. The safeguarding language is the point. The company did not describe a bigger plant. It described a reason not to make this one smaller.

What a supplier is actually being offered

The Kicks uses Nissan’s series-hybrid arrangement: a petrol engine makes electricity, and an electric motor drives the wheels. That is a powertrain derivative on a site that already builds hybrids and a battery car, not a new process from a clean floor. The £170 million will be absorbed by tools, tryout and the work of putting one more body through a hall that has already been simplified. It is not the budget of a second shift.

For a firm that sells into Sunderland, the useful split is this. A new model can move part numbers, coatings, and a hybrid transmission. It does not, on the company’s own account, move headcount or the shift pattern. A quote that assumes the plant goes from half capacity to full, because a minister called it confidence, is a quote for a factory Nissan has not described. The factory it described still has no start date, an open conversation with Chery, and about half of its hours unused.