Nissan will spend £170 million to build the Kicks hybrid in Sunderland

Nissan said on 16 September it will invest £170 million, about $228 million, so that its Sunderland plant can build the second-generation Kicks hybrid for Europe and Turkey. The model uses the company’s e-POWER system, in which a petrol engine charges a battery and an electric motor turns the wheels. Kicks is already built in Japan, Mexico and Brazil. Sunderland would be its European source. It would be the tenth model produced at the plant since 1986, the year the factory opened. The site marks its 40th anniversary this year.

The Kicks line will sit beside Qashqai, Juke and the electric Leaf. Nissan did not give a production start date. It said the decision would not add jobs or change shift patterns. The point, it said, is to protect the jobs that are there. Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds called the announcement a vote of confidence in British manufacturing. Vehicles from the line are due to be sold in Britain and exported to the rest of Europe and to Turkey.

Sunderland is still the country’s largest car assembly plant. It has also looked underused. Nissan said in June it was talking to China’s Chery about putting Chery models on one of the two lines from fiscal 2027 to raise utilisation. Those talks continue. Reuters reported the same month that the British government was discussing financial support in return for a longer Nissan commitment. Wednesday’s £170 million is Nissan’s own money on a named model. It is not a Chery deal and it is not a published subsidy package.

The company has been cutting in Europe, including 900 jobs announced earlier this year and a partial warehouse closure in Barcelona. It shelved an electric Qashqai. Against that backdrop a hybrid small SUV is a defensive product: cheaper to run than a large petrol crossover, less dependent on a pure-electric market that has slowed. e-POWER lets Nissan sell a hybrid without teaching European buyers a new badge.

What the announcement does not do is settle the plant’s second line. If Chery arrives, Sunderland becomes a contract site as well as a Nissan site. If Chery does not, the Kicks volume has to justify the floor space on its own. Reynolds can call the investment a vote of confidence. The more precise reading is that Nissan chose to put one more model into a factory it was not prepared to shrink this week, and left the harder utilisation question for the Chery file.