Nissan Juke rolls out of UK

The wee Nissan Juke is set to arrive in New Zealand in January next year. Photo / Jacqui Madelin

With New Zealanders buying more SUVs and particularly compact SUVs, it comes as no surprise that two new models with the potential to grab sales will soon hit showroom floors, Ford's Kuga in November, and Nissan's smaller Juke by January 2012.

Our first Juke shipment rolls from the Sunderland, UK factory this month, the three square-kilometre site manufacturing 800 Juke alongside 1200 Qashqai each day on two shifts, as I recently discovered.

That's 53 examples of the funky compact SUV each hour, painted bodies in batches of 30 per colour rolling above us as we approach the factory line. Batch painting is better for the environment - "there's less flushing of gunge, less use of solvent" says final assembly production manager Andy Drake, "It's cost efficient," a factor vital to a UK factory competing with cheap labour overseas.

A kit box unique to the car follows it down the line, with parts allocated for a carefully measured 70 seconds of work per job. This is low-cost automation. Equipment like the shuttle used to slide through the door to bolt in parts then slide out ready for the next car is built here in the workshops from materials salvaged from earlier tasks.

These guys work in tight teams each with a supervisor and take a personal interest in building to a quality standard; "our philosophy is we don't pass defects on to the customer - and the customer is the next zone on the line."

Team members each learn three jobs and rotate, partly to ensure there are no gaps caused by absence and partly because, "at the end of the day it's a production line and it's going to be boring. And some jobs are more difficult or less comfortable in ergonomic terms, another reason to rotate."

Among all that these guys keep track of multiple components - Sunderland builds for 53 different countries, and even the language labels must be right. I'm told the device that makes quality fool-proof is called a poky yoke - "If the torque on the suspension bolts isn't done properly it'll auto stop the line; we have a lot of pokey-yokey devices around the shop."

Quality feedback stations punctuate the factory floor, an enormous dark cavern clanking with machinery, only the area immediately around the line brightly lit, to save power.

An axle, engine and transmission are lifted into a Juke and bolted down within a minute, "This is one of the most skilled areas, to put all that in at this speed, and the two operators have to work very closely together."

Each Juke takes three hours to complete before its final inspection, including an eight-minute rainstorm, a 1.7km drive over various surfaces plus rolling road tests, and I'm here to tell you that rocketing along at 110kph while pedestrians overtake you is a very strange feeling indeed.

Sunderland built 423,000 Nissans last year, one in three cars made in the UK from all brands. It exports 80 per cent of them, including the Jukes we'll drive in January.