Nissan plans to build a battery plant for electric cars
- Nissan is negotiating with the British government to build a battery plant in the UK as part of a post-Brexit plan to make the country the main production center for the carmaker outside of Japan and the United States.
- The new plant will be built near Sunderland which currently produces the Nissan Qashqai, Nissan Juke and Nissan Leaf for the European market, including Russia. This plant, with a capacity of 500,000 vehicles per year, produced only 245,649 units in 2020, compared to 371,304 in 2019 and 442,254 in 2018.
- In 2020, the Nissan Qashqai accounted for 149,426 units produced, the Nissan Juke 72,745 units and the Nissan Leaf 23,478 units. The Infiniti Q30 & QX30 were discontinued in 2019 and the Nissan Note in 2017.
- The Sunderland plant has therefore been in decline for several years and the carmaker wants to boost the plant with the future production of a battery electric crossover and the construction of a plant to assemble batteries for electric cars. Nissan will cooperate with the Chinese battery maker Envision AESC, with which Nissan has already worked for more than 10 years. The future battery plant will be able to equip 200,000 battery electric cars from 2024 (9 GWh), then 500,000 units in 2030 (25 GWh), and even 35 GWh in the long term. However, it is not clear whether the plant will only assemble cells already produced elsewhere, or if it will cover the entire process, from cell production to assembly into modules and then into packs.
- With the expected growth in sales of electric cars all over the world, Nissan, like other carmakers, confirms that the production of batteries on a large scale, not only to supply the brands of the Renault-Nissan group but also brands of other automotive groups, is a necessity. Thus the vision of cooperation between carmakers for the production of batteries is moving away in favour of "individual" production.
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