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The Nissan Leaf will be built in Sunderland from 2013, the company has announced.

Nissan's decision to build the five-seat electric car in the UK will result in the creation of Europe's largest electric car plant. Initial production will be 50,000 units a year.

Nissan also says the decision will protect 2250 jobs at Sunderland, and within its supply chain.

The announcement follows a state pledge to supply over half of the £420m of investment needed to start production. The D...Read the full article

Its good it will be getting its own lanes to drive in. This way they wont block the other traffic when they grind to a halt after running out of power.

Still its good they will be built here. We need all the manufacturing we can get. I wonder if Nissan believe the pound will still be this week by 2013 to help improve the profitability of building them here?

 great news for sunderland but that car looks awful lol

Sort of good news I guess - too bad it's soooo ugly no1 will buy one. Any car that makes a prius look good has serous problems. Besides- I think the chevy volt / vauxhall ampera will be way better.

Admittedly i heard it on the lunchtime news but what great news for the Sunderland area, i hope some of the other car makers can make a committment like this also, we have a great car building heritage and i hope our government take notice of this and support the industry, even if it's a Tory government!  

I think Nissan should have won the Olympic bid - afterall, they employ lots of people here and continue to invest in this country. Yes, BMW may own mini but they are still different companies and not all are built in this country.

Priority lanes?

Eh?

Who gave 'One North East' authority to promise that to the detriment of other road users?

Did anybody else hear Jeremy Vine on Radio2 today trying to draw comparisons between this and the DeLorean catastrophe? Talk about desperate radio! Not for the first time I found myself longing for Jimmy Young!

Anyway, I think this is good news. The broader choice you for how to run your personal transport the better.

This all looks like Nissan going up a blind alley.  The car may be zero emissions but the power station generating the electricity is certainly not.

Politicians seem to be happy to jump on the bandwagon - a shame that the full picture is obscured by supposed 'green thinking'.The big minuses are likely to be the maximum 100 mile range (less than that in reality?) and  the no doubt hefty list price.  The price will need to be heavily subsidised but that is no basis for a sustainable future for this type of car.At least Nissan are not too ambitious with the production figures at just 50,000 pa.Far more interesting is the investment by Ford in developing the future of petrol technology at Dagenham.

 

This car will never be all things to all people, but it will have great appeal to anyone who does mainly short journeys, and that includes quite a lot of folk. It's good to see it being built in Sunderland; it's a very efficient factory turning out high quality cars and green high-tech products like this are just what we need to get the economy moving again.

I wouldn't worry about Nissan not being the Olympic Games car, the games are already a shambles and will probably get worse. It will probably be BMW that gets the egg on its face and Nissan could be the ones to benefit from Boris Johnson's enthusiasm for electric cars and developing the infrastructure for them, which is more likely to be an enduring thing.