11:32 am, March 13, 2025
Nissan would be mad to quit the UK – and it’s ‘extraordinary’ that the Japanese manufacturer finds itself in such bad shape in 2025, according to its former chief operating officer Dr Andy Palmer.
Appearing on stage as the first interviewee at Car Dealer Live today, Palmer delivered a withering assessment of his former employer’s current fortunes. He said it had lost ground to rival manufacturers on the EV front, despite having launched the first mass-market electric car – Leaf – back in 2010.
Nissan has a substantial footprint in the UK, with a manufacturing plant in Sunderland, a technical centre in Cranfield, Bedfordshire, and a design studio in London.
Palmer himself played a leading role in bringing LEAF to market during his time as Nissan COO and has even been described as the ‘godfather of EVs’ for his decades of work in the field.
He was interviewed by Car Dealer Magazine editor-in-chief James Baggott today, who mentioned the fact that the Japanese manufacturer had been ‘incredibly vocal’ about the UK’s ZEV mandate, which requires car manufacturers to increase the proportion of EVs they sell year-on-year or pay heavy fines.
He asked Palmer: ‘Do you ever think that Nissan could pull out of the UK?’
Palmer replied: ‘They’d be mad if they did.’ And addressing delegates at the National Motor Museum in Gaydon, he added: ‘We’re all members of the car industry, right? We all know how to lobby. We all know that we’ve got a leverage over the government when we’re asking for grants and we all use that when necessary.
‘So the easiest thing to do if you want to make life easier for yourself, is to tell the government you’re going to leave unless you’re given something. I’ve been doing that with governments around the world since 1990. You can really scare the government and they will cave in if they’re stupid.
‘The problem with the government as it stands is that they have been out of power for 14 years and they have forgotten how to govern. They’ve got to relearn. Rightly, however, they are listening to our industry and our industry is having a hard time.’
Baggott referred to the proposed Honda-Nissan merger which he said had ‘apparently died a death’, and the fact that Nissan CEO Makoto Uchida stepped down earlier this month.
Palmer commented: ‘It’s extraordinary that Nissan finds itself in such bad shape having taken leadership of EV. But if you were to ask my Japanese colleagues, they’d say, ‘that is the history of Nissan’.
‘Nissan has invented over and over again in the past. Did you know Nissan invented the hybrid? But then it ceded that technology to Toyota. It was one of the first manufacturers to introduce autonomous driving but it ceded that technology to most of the Chinese manufacturers.
‘It largely invented the mass-production EV but it’s ceded that to everybody else. So in many respects, what you find, is that Nissan is an intellectual company which is very good at developing stuff, but generally speaking is impatient and not committed to the long term.
‘The reason that Nissan is no longer leading in EVs has nothing to do with the distractions around [former CEO] Carlos Ghosn. They had already started departing EVs under Ghosn’s leadership.
‘Nissan always hated being part of the Renault alliance. It doesn’t like to play in the same sandpit as somebody else. It was grateful in the first year of the alliance. It turned itself around and became very profitable.
‘‘However, some parts of Nissan were always looking for a reason to explode the alliance – and they did. And now there isn’t an alliance and there isn’t a relationship with Renault so to some extent the Nissan leadership got what they wished for.
‘But now they find out that, alone, they can’t survive. And for them, the idea that you could get taken over by a Chinese or Taiwanese manufacturer, is abhorrent. For Nissan, it’s unthinkable that the company could disappear. And so they look and they seek, and they say, wouldn’t it make sense to bring Honda and Nissan together.
‘However, they are two very, very different companies in culture. I think it would be an ever harder alliance [to make work] than the alliance with Renault but Nissan might not have a choice.
‘The reality is that they are in very bad shape. It doesn’t have a portfolio of worth; it hasn’t got hybrids for the US, it hasn’t got EVs for China, it’s virtually given up on Europe – it’s in a bad way.’
