Car making is seen as a crown jewel of UK industry. I think because all consumers understand cars, and because they're reasonably expensive, it's easy to get footage of what they do, which people understand and they seem to employ lots of people.
So when a story appears about Jaguar Land Rover cutting 4500 jobs and moving them to Slovakia, there's a lot of people making a lot of noise about Brexit. Same with the story about Nissan not making the X-Trail.
I'm a leaver. But I'm not here to argue the effects of Brexit on UK car making. Because it's largely irrelevant. Assembly line car making (and I'm not including the likes of Aston Martin) is going to be gone from the UK in the fairly near future because assembly line car making will be gone from Western Europe in the fairly near future with production shifting eastwards.
- Turkey is currently making Renault Clios and Toyota Corollas. Renault plan to expand production there.
- The Fiat 500 is made in Serbia and Poland.
- VW Group of course make Skodas in Czech Republic, the Up, Touareg and Q7 in Bratislava, and are also considering making Passats in the Czech Republic or in Bulgaria.
- Peugeot make 207s and Citreon Picassos in Slovakia.
- The UK made 1.75m cars in 2017. Turkey is at just under 1.7m. UK car making has grown by less than 10% in 5 years, while Turkish production has grown by nearly 60%. Link
Fiat and Toyota are of course making cars in these places because labor is cheaper. According to this, Czech Republic car workers make just over half the wages of UK car workers. And I'm going to guess Turkish car workers are making a little less than the Czechs. And is anyone doubting the quality of those cars? Are they any worse than any other Corolla?
What's keeping car production lines going in Britain is, I suspect that we already have the plants and not much else. In 1986, Nissan couldn't have put production in Eastern Europe because it was still communist. And even for some years after, they couldn't have done it because of things like transportation and infrastructure. But these countries now have everything in place and eventually, our manufacturers will follow.
At a larger level, I think people in the UK need to understand that production line manufacturing is either going or gone. UK manufacturing still matters, but it's manufacturing that's more specialised, small scale or customised like F1 cars or the company near me that hand-makes furniture. The part of manufacturing we will keep for some time is things like product design and engineering - Dysons get made in Malaysia but they get designed in Wiltshire.