The start of the second generation Qashqai production at the Nissan factory in Sunderland in Northern England last week represents an investment of more than £3.5 billion by the company, and 80 percent of Qashqai production will be exported to more than 130 global markets, including Ireland, writes Trish Whelan. One in three cars built in the UK is a Nissan, and the company has been Britain's biggest car producer since 1998.
Over 7,000 people are employed at Sunderland but the company supports 40,000 jobs across the UK automotive industry jobs in design, engineering, manufacturing, marketing and sales.
New Qashqai will only be a 5-seater as the role of 7-seat will be assumed by the New X-Trail due in the Summer and dubbed in Nissan as 'Qashqai's Big Brother'.
The new car is now in full production and one is built every 61 seconds on a line which has been running on 24-hour operations since 2010 to meet demand. It's where the LEAF EV is also made. Other cars produced here are the Note, Juke and Nismo.
Apart from driving the new car for an afternoon, a big highlight for me was the production line tour to view Qashqais being made. Every car produced here has been ordered by a dealer — as a Nissan factory spokesman said, 'we don't build cars to store in compounds'.
Our engineer-guide took us through the various procedures along the production lines, from gearboxes, engines, chassis, fitting windscreens, to the final stage of re-fitting the car's doors and everything else inbetween. We discovered it takes only two seconds to fit a dashboard module. "Everything on that cockpit module will work. Everything has been tested prior to coming into the car. The last guy on the team checks everything fitted to the car, right down to all the nuts and bolts." Every detail is recorded with a sequence number on a special document, so any problem is traceable. The work schedule, we learnt, is controlled by computer, with everything in its proper sequence. "But you can't do without the guy in the pit underneath the car, checking from below."
Some 828 robots in the factory make 3,367 welds on each Qashqai and there are 2,708 parts in each car.
We also watched a full brake performance test with ESP and ABS being done by very skilled operators on a rolling road in a special booth — it's all done in under one minute, before the next one rolls in. The results of each test are stored against the chassis number in case of any query later.
Three shifts per day on the two production lines means a very busy workforce. Operators work like clockwork and job-share for greater flexibility; the guys all seemed to be in their 20s and 30s and very fit. The manual work is deemed far too strenuous for women operators, but there are women supervisors. The starting salary is about £22,000 including shift allowance but without overtime.
Plans are in progress to produce a new premium compact model at the factory, the Q30 under the Infiniti brand. It will be the first Nissan production vehicle in Europe to be based on the new Common Module Family (CMF) Renault-Nissan Alliance platform.
The Sunderland plant now makes 500,000 cars per year which makes it the biggest such manufacturing plant in the UK.
