Nissan will off-shore to India the engineering of two new European-built models as part of its drive to cut costs.
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A new engineering centre at Chennai (once Madras), which has just opened, will crunch the numbers and handle the detail component engineering for Nissan’s new compact soft-roader and a redesigned commercial van.
Lower engineering costs are driving the change in strategy, which will shift high-technology work from Cranfield, Britain, and Barcelona, Spain, to India.
According to a well-placed source, engineering costs in India are up to 40% lower than in the UK and 10% lower than in Spain.
The new soft-roader is scheduled to go into production in 2010 in Sunderland. It will be over 4m long, so quite close in dimensions to the current 4.3m-long Qashqai and will sell on its combination of strong styling and raised seating position.
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By GlobalDataNissan plans that it will achieve a bigger margin than a typical B-segment supermini.
The soft-roader will replace the Micra at Sunderland, production of the next-generation supermini transferring to Chennai, India.
Nissan’s new van will be built in Morocco at a EUR600m joint-venture plant established with Renault near Tangiers. Capacity will be 200,000 units in 2010 rising to 400,000.
But the move to shift engineering of both these models to India will be a blow to engineers in Europe.
Nissan’s European operations have only recently successfully finished their first complete project — design, engineering and manufacture — of the Qashqai and its long-wheelbase variant, the Qashqai+2.
The Qashqai was designed in London at Nissan’s European Design Centre, engineered at Cranfield and is built in Sunderland.
Today, if the same project was under way, Nissan said that the engineering would most likely be undertaken in India, to save costs. “If we were doing the Qashqai now, it would be engineered in India,” the source said.
There is still a role for engineering at Cranfield and Barcelona, though. Both centres will continue to do advanced concept and design engineering and the detail specification work — the highest intellectual property-type work that only experienced and highly-skilled engineers can carry-out.
Julian Rendell
