ONE of Britain’s largest technology, assembly and training investments is heading towards a landmark in a £200 million programme.
In a few months, Nissan Motor Manufacturing will complete the build and start equipping its first battery production plant outside Japan which has been erected on the car maker’s Sunderland site, along with the autumn opening of the new international Skills Academy for Sustainable Manufacturing and Innovation, which will offer 1,000 places for the next generation of technicians.
Overseeing both has been Sunderland veteran Trevor Mann, now senior vice president manufacturing, purchasing and supply chain management at Nissan.
The battery plant has been created to support the Renault-Nissan Alliance in building its new generation of electric vehicles in Europe and a sister battery plant is also being built in Portugal, but its scheduled to open six months after Sunderland in early 2012.
It has created 350 new jobs in its highly automated assembly operation which includes a clean room more akin to a hospital operating theatre and which has a super-dry atmosphere.
Mr Mann said: “The plant includes a hospital-type clean room which would be familiar with colleagues working in the electronics and semi-conductor industries and where the air is dried to -20C to take out any moisture which is the killer for battery components.
“The first machinery will be brought in from Japan in early summer and there is a long period of installation and commissioning to ensure everything works without a hitch and our first trial build batteries will begin towards the end of 2011 with production versions due in about a year’s time.”
Those will supply Nissan's alliance partner Renault and eventually go into the LEAF electric vehicle models scheduled to be assembled in Sunderland early in 2013.
In the car plant itself, production is steadily rising. In 2010 it assembled more than 420,000 Qashqai, Note, Micra and some Juke models.
Mr Mann believes the total output this year will be about 440,000 models with over 80 per cent exported, which means Nissan is the biggest exporter of UK made models.
“It is a big challenge for manufacturing to live up to the expectations of sales and marketing but we are rising to it and we have tremendous workforce," added Mr Mann. "In the bad weather of December we never lost production because people wanted to come to work and not let down their colleagues or the company.”
Rivals Toyota and Ford are also building engines at their Deeside, Bridgend and Dagenham plants to support demand for their economy models and BMW is overwhelmed with demand for its MINI variants at Oxford, which it supplies with UK built engines produced at Hams Hall in the Midlands.