Monday 4 February 2019

NIssan - what deal?

In 2016 there was a big story that ran for a few days about the Government doing a deal with Nissan. This deal supposedly made the next gen of Nissan cars guaranteed to be built in the UK.

Fast forward to 2019 and no Nissan have reneged on the 'deal'. In part no doubt as the UK Government promised a deal of sorts that has not as yet materialised.


However, all companies are blaming everything on Brexit - redundancies; Brexit, outsourcing; Brexit; slow revenues; Brexit. It is just way too tempting for the PR flacks to use a ready made 3rd party excuse which has the handy benefit of not being in the control of management.


Nissan, have bigger problens, diesel sales have gone off a cliff and their new X-trail in entering  a much more competitive X-over SUV market. So, perhaps running a smaller line in Japan is a better hedge, plus with their new EU trade deal, this does not cost Japan in terms of export taxes. After all of this, is the effect of Brexit on just in time delivery. So a second or third order issue.


Which to me neatly sums up the Brexit impact, Remoaners see its effect everywhere, leavers that Nissan is doing this only for non-Brexit reasons. Both are wrong, a no deal Brexit will be very bad fro manufacturing businesses in the short-term, even with some of the prep happening now.


So there is a Brexit effect, but perhaps it is not as serious as meaning the Queen will need to flee to the Colonies for the foreseeable.

11 comments:

formertory said...

Pretty close to your colleague's prediction in his Christmas Opera post..........

Nissan dorma, indeed!

Charles said...

Makes sense to me, Nissan have quite a lot on their plate at the moment, and like all big Japanese companies they are very risk averse. This is a nice face saving way of ducking out, if we have any brains we will smile and wave, when things improve they will return. Japan is not a low cost centre so their decision to manufacture there is not without costs of its own.

It’s about time someone really got going with proper battery technology and more importantly the charging speeds. Electric cars have so few moving parts that they will revolutionise manufacturing and supply chains. Range and convenience are the main problems at the moment, once solved the car industry will be a shadow of its former self, no engine plants, no gear box plants, simplified transmissions mean you do not need to move parts backwards and forwards across the globe. The first company to get this right will be dancing on its competition for a generation. Just pray that it is not Amazon...

Anonymous said...

I think batteries are very near the limit of development.

Don Cox

James Higham said...

Most interesting about Nissan, CUS, I came to learn.

andrew said...


I have a slightly different take:

Batteries may well improve a lot

What is not improving rapidly - or at all - atm is the rate at which a battery can charge.

The other thing that is not improving - and probably wont - is the problem of generating a lot more electricity and piping that electricity to car charging stations in a safe, non-polluting and reliable manner.





E-K said...

They haven't moved to the EU.

BTW. Nissans now have Renault engines. What's the point in that then ?

Anonymous said...

Re GF's point about battery technology - key to the electric car thing, surely - how much do we know, or how accurately might technically educated sources be guessing, about what Dyson is working on at Hullavington?

E-K said...

They've gone quiet about graphene

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/graphene-batteries-supercapacitors

I've a lad who has been working in a lab with a team on chemical micro switches. If this comes through it will do for transistors what transistors did for electric valves.

Within a generation or so we will be doing most things by very realistic virtual reality and not moving very much anyway.

Anonymous said...

E-K, whenever I see forecasts such as yours, I cannot help thinking of the widespread predictions in the 1950s (among top RAF chiefs as well as scientists and political pundits) that the manned aircraft was on its way out imminently, to be replaced by guided missiles... I think we all know how that turned out. It was partly responsible for the 1957 White paper (Sandys, a Tory government) which laid waste to swathes of the UK aerospace industry, as destructive (maybe more so) as the later Wilson government's cancelling the TSR-2 and P-1154 projects.
People are saying much the same currently about drones...

E-K said...

Well. Imagine computer processing on a quantum level - infinitely faster than today and apply the technology to video conferencing and Skyped family visits.

When I've Skyped with my boys I already come away feeling like they've really been in the room with me. Imagine an even more immersive experience. I can even see us getting around the age old problem of being able to be in only one place at a time and missing events.

Lasers. That's the way warfare is going. There won't even be aircraft or drones.

E-K said...

PS, Flattered that my whacky insights could determine public policy. Wow !