British car industry expands

While bad news for the British car industry like the closure of MG Rover and Peugeot ending its UK manufacturing tends to get splashed across the newspapers, positive developments rarely make it further than the specialist car media. A false image of the state of the industry results which, here at Pro-Car, we'll be doing our best to set straight.

The start of production of the new generation Mini at Cowley this week is one such example and is in fact just the latest piece of recent good news about the British car industry.

Like many other major British car brands, nowadays Mini is ultimately owned by a foreign firm - BMW. But the German company operates three manufacturing plants in Britain which directly and indirectly provide jobs for thousands of people. The decision to continue Mini production at their Cowley plant means an extra £200 million investment in British manufacturing and jobs for 450 more people. And with more parts for this new Mini being made in Britain, a further 750 new jobs are being created at supplier companies. Since its launch the Mini has been a huge success story, with 75% of the Oxfordshire-assembled cars being exported worldwide.

There was also good news recently from Ford, whose two British engine plants at Bridgend and Dagenham started production of new V8 diesel and V6 petrol engines. Together the plants will produce almost 1.3 million engines this year to power a range of Ford, Mazda, Volvo, Land Rover, Jaguar and even Peugeot and Citroen cars.

Ford invests in the environment

In addition to the £640 million Ford invested in Dagenham three years ago and £245 million the company has put into Bridgend in the last two years, Ford also recently announced a £1 billion investment in their British technical centres at Dunton, Whitley and Gaydon. The centres will aim to develop lightweight technologies, hybrid engines and alternative fuel systems towards creating cars capable of 70mpg and emitting less than 100 g/km of CO2.

Environmentalists will be pleased to hear that when the new technologies are applied across their family of car brands, Ford claim the annual CO2 savings will be the same as the annual emissions of a city like Newcastle upon Tyne.

New sports car to be built in Wales

It was also announced in July that a British company has bought the rights to the soon to be discontinued Smart Roadster and plans to restart production of a re-named car based on it. Equipment is set to be transferred to a facility in Wales from Smart's German factory, ready for production of over 8,000 cars a year starting mid-2007.

The North East also received some good news as Nissan unveiled a new model to be built at their award-winning Sunderland factory - Britain's largest car plant. The unusually-named Qashqai will go on sale early next year, and 25,000 every year are even set to be exported back to Japan. 200 new jobs have already been created, taking the total employed there to 4,300. The plant also makes the firm's Almera, Note and Micra models.

Happy Birthday Honda UK

And finally, this year Honda is celebrating the 20th anniversary of its UK factory in Swindon. The plant employs over 4,000 people and builds the five-door Civic and the CR-V models. By next year it will also start production of the range-topping Civic Type R. Honda has invested £1.3 billion in the facility, which is now making 885 cars a day - 75% of which are exported.

Threats posed by anti-car policies

This first post on the British car industry has been a bit of a round-up - we'll post news as it happens from now on. But it provides a useful demonstration, even taking only recent developments, of the potential threat posed to tens of thousands of jobs and billions of pounds of earnings and investment in this country by those working to create a hostile environment for cars and their users.

Massively ramping up the costs of using cars blaming theories about the human influence on climate change not only has a directly repressive effect on the large numbers people who have no option but to use a car. It also threatens the viability of all these large successful businesses. Journalists, politicians and campaigners who mindlessly repeat unscientific enviro-propaganda need to spend more time explaining the devastating effect their resulting anti-car policies are likely to have on a major British manufacturing industry and related jobs.