The history of car manufacturing in the UK has not been smooth. There was a period in which our once proud car industry had a spectacular fall from grace, but this unfortunate episode in our manufacturing history is well behind us and the UK is once again seen as a manufacturing force to be reckoned with. So much so, that Nissan has just announced a £100 million investment in its Sunderland factory in order to build the new Juke model.
According to a BBC report Nissan’s Sunderland factory already makes more cars than the entire Italian car industry and this latest contract will only boost the perception of UK car manufacturing across the world. Speaking on BBC radio five Paul Wilcox, Chairman of Nissan Europe, welcomed the announcement but also said that even more could be done in the UK to boost innovation and engineering excellence. Commenting that this is a key priority for Nissan, he acknowledged that there was a gap in this area but that they were working with the government to ensure that they get the right level of investment in terms of driving innovation and bringing people into engineering.
However, he went on to say that although more could be done, the current innovation and excellence in engineering gap was not impacting Nissan as could be evidenced by existing levels of quality and performance. And this is the thing about innovation; it is not a closed end solution, rather it is a way of delivering continuing improvements, each one building on the previous one in an ongoing search for providing quality solutions and customer excellence.