'Despite the fanfare, look beneath the bonnet and it’s no bed for roses for Nissan's Sunderland plant'

Visit Sunderland Museum and there you’ll see - next to Wallace the stuffed lion - a white Nissan Bluebird. Not just any Bluebird, the very first Nissan car to roll off the production line at the Japanese firm’s Sunderland factory in 1986. The car plant replaced shipbuilding as one of the major industries in Sunderland. There were 470 workers on its payroll at the time, and the car took more than a day to build. Forty years later and Nissan has surpassed another milestone, with the plant having now built 12 million vehicles since 1986. Nowadays, a car rolls off the production line, on average, the equivalent of one every 1 minute 45 seconds. Along with the Bluebird, Sunderland has also made the Primera, Micra, Almera, Note, Infiniti Q30, Juke, Qashqai and all-electric LEAF. From next year, it will also manufacture the all-new, third-generation Juke which, for the first time, will be 100% electric. News that the Nissan Kicks will also be made at Sunderland is a further boost the plant and its 6,000 workers employed directly and an estimated further 30,000 jobs in the supply chain. Yet despite the fanfare, and the promise of £170million of investment, look beneath the bonnet and it’s no bed for roses for the plant. In May this year, Nissan announced it was to stop using one of its production lines. The company said at the time that no jobs would be lost because of the line merger but confirmed the 900 being cut across Europe included a small number of UK-based office roles. In a bid to share costs, Nissan is holding talks with Chinese rival Chery to share vehicle production at Sunderland. However, it is Chinese car makers that pose perhaps the biggest threat to the plant’s long-term future. Brands such as BYD have snatched market share in the UK, with their extras-packed electric vehicles appealing to budget conscious buyers and proving a major challenge to the likes of Jaguar Land Rover and Volkswagen too. Massimiliano Messina, one of Nissan’s top bosses, has called on the UK government to impose import tariffs on Chinese cars and to slash electric vehicle targets to, he says, ensure the Sunderland plant’s future. I’ve been lucky enough to tour the Sunderland plant and speak to some of its workers. A vast hi-tech plant, you can tell the pride of the employees, but also the factory’s importance not just to Sunderland but to a much wider area of the North East. However, I am also reminded of another occasion, touring the site of a promised gigafactory half an hour’s drive away north, in Blyth. Grand plans that the project, on the site of Blyth’s old coal-fired power station, would bring regeneration and jobs to the area turned to dust when the firm behind it went bust. Nissan, like other long established car makers, face a bumpy road again. But it is critical that, for the sake of the plant’s army of skilled workers, none of its cars end up in a museum for the wrong reasons.