Nissan expands manufacturing base in Australia

Nissan may have stopped building cars in Australia in 1992, but it will continue to produce automotive components well after Ford ceases local manufacturing next year and Holden and Toyota close the doors on the nation’s final two car factories in 2017, reports motoring website motoring.com.au.

While Holden has announced it will bring forward the redundancies of 270 workers to next month following lack of demand for its Commodore and Cruze models, Nissan has revealed that new export contracts will keep its Melbourne casting plant at near capacity beyond 2020. And while Ford claims its ongoing design and development work will make it Australia’s largest automotive industry employer by 2018, Nissan Australia says its $65 million casting business will be expanded by a new multimillion-dollar contract to export aluminium castings to the US, Japan, UK, Thailand, South Korea and Mexico.

Nissan Australia CEO Richard Emery said the company’s casting plant makes his company a fully integrated OEM that also sells, markets, finances, races and tests cars (in its capacity as one of just nine global Field Quality test centres globally), and will be the only remaining carmaker to do so post-2017.

“It’s often overlooked that Nissan is also a local automotive manufacturer,” he said. “Some people think auto manufacturing in Australia is dead. It’s alive and well here at Nissan Australia.”

Since September last year, Nissan Casting has established a number of contracts with its Japanese parent company, on top of the 49 components it already produces annually for 30 global vehicles including six in Australia - the Nissan LEAF, QASHQAI, Pathfinder and new NP300 Navara, plus the Infiniti Q50 and Renault Koleos.

In all, the plant makes parts for 30 different Nissan, Infiniti, Renault and even Datsun models sold all over the world.

First opened in 1982, the casting plant covers 94,000 m² of land, just 20,000 of which is covered by facilities that house molten aluminium, robots, machining booths and casting machines that produce highly complex cast components that appear machined, thanks in part to technology blockage prevention developed with the CSIRO, guaranteeing a tolerance of as little as 15 microns - less than the diameter of a human hair.

Apart from making 10 different accessories including tow bars, the parts factory specialises in the manufacture of high- and low-pressure aluminium die-casting, machining and component assembly, such as EV parts, transmission housings, final drive housings and oil pans.

Nissan Casting Australia Managing Director Peter Jones said the declining value of the Australian dollar and relatively high labour costs had failed to slow growth at the plant, which continues to win global component contracts because of its consistently low costs and high quality.

“Part of the reason we’ve secured even more business from Nissan - some of it exclusive to Nissan Casting Australia - is quality. These developments will see Nissan Casting operating well beyond 2020. Manufacturing is far from dead in Australia and we’re proof of that,” he said.