Here’s the truth about Honda & Swindon. Not saying Brexit isn’t shit, but an awful lot of companies are going to use this as an excuse for plans they already probably had. This is from a former colleague of mine…
Honda at Swindon, the truthful version and not one that the BBC will poorly research. Since 2008, half the Swindon plant has been mothballed. The risk was always that the underused site could be closed when the current Civic production ends. Turkey will supply the Civic into Europe despite massive quality control issues, they produce all saloon Civic’s currently. The overarching reason for closure is simply due to a large proportion of production at Swindon is for the USA, and that was in order to keep the production lines fully operating. The fear is that Trump will introduce further tariffs on global car imports, making the production at Swindon non-viable, especially with the massive investment that would be required for the new Civic due 2022-23. Honda Japan will make a decision on whether to expanded production in Canada over the coming months, open a plant in America, or supply from Japan. Brexit whilst an annoyance to Japan is not the reason for closure. The European H.Q. will remain at Bracknell. Add into the equation the fact that the Honda European market for the Civic is relatively small and that they reacted very slowly to the decline in the diesel market, the growth of hybrid and full electric power plus the re-emergence of petrol. How do I know all of this, well my brother is one of the senior managers at their European H.Q. Management were told today, staff tomorrow. Finally ‘not enough people are buying our products’, said my brother.
Sounds plausible. If the bit about Turkeys quality control is the Honda have really changed their ways.
When I worked at Longbridge, the Rover and Honda cars went down exactly the same production line. The big difference was that the Honda cars went through QC and the Rovers straight to the car park for delivery.
Honda used to have bullet proof engines - people were prepared to pay a bit more for that reliability. Then the wedge shaped Civic came out and (as per most car manufacturers) quantity went up and quality went down, including engine failures. Now Hondas were expensive, not pretty and not reliable and didn’t have the cache that the german cars (for similar money) had.
So we have JLR blaming brexit when it was in no small part due to chinese quality control, we have Honda indirectly blaming brexit when it was poor sales, Nissan using it in part when they are taking up the opportunity to export direct from Japan. I’m not saying brexit isn’t behind some of this, but it’s a gold plated excuse for bad news or unpopular decisions…
The UK were part of that negotiation and fully signed up to it. Never mind, we can soon put import tariffs on all cars so we citizens can have the privilege of paying more.
Toyota has factories in France, Portugal, Czech, Poland and the UK. They have said that Brexit means the future of the UK plant is uncertain.
Nissan has factories in Spain and the UK. They have done a U-Turn on future production of the X-Trail in the UK.
Just seems to be the UK getting the shaft - but I’m sure it’s the merest co-incidence.
A little part of me wonders why any Japanese (car) company would set up shop as far from home as possible, in the least accessible part of the EU, where the only import/export locations involve boats or a ‘special train’, with shit internal infrastructure and famously mardy workers… Almost any mainland EU country would have made more sense unless there is plenty of money changing hands and that has now stopped. Especially when at the time they came, we had a reputation for shocking quality…
If it goes ahead, it would be the ideal time to campaign for the UK to transition to driving on the right [oops, edit.] I’m hoping for at least 48% support from the off.
So many benefits from joining a larger market, and the kind of taking control to give Brexiteers apoplexy.
The Japanese spent a couple of decades taking their own industries from shocking quality (when I was a schoolkid in the 60’s ‘Made In Japan’ was associated only with ‘cheap and nasty’) to world-beating. Perhaps they were confident they could improve it here (perhaps they have, in fact ?).
The other attractive feature of the UK workforce from the 80’s onwards was that they became steadily cheaper and easier to sack. This change wasn’t happening at the time in Europe.
I was living in Oxford in the early 80’s by which time Honda had got into partnership with British Leyland. When their decision to set up a brand new plant in Swindon was announced there was a lot of grumpiness in Oxford that they hadn’t decided to locate at Cowley where there was a good deal of contraction either looming or already happening. It was argued that there was appropriate factory space and a ready-made workforce, experienced in the car industry, that Honda could take on. The fact was that Honda would much sooner take on new people who wouldn’t need to be de-radicalised before being able to learn the Japanese way of doing things.
