Nissan's Kicks gets the Sunderland slot the electric Qashqai lost
Sunderland's tenth model is a hybrid the 2023 plan never mentioned
Nissan will build the Kicks e-Power at Sunderland for the UK, Europe and Turkey, backed by £170 million, the first European sale of a crossover that has found 1.8 million buyers in more than 70 countries since 2016. The announcement, timed to the plant's 40th anniversary, lists the Kicks as the tenth model since the Bluebird. It does not list the electric Qashqai the same plant was promised in 2023.
The Kicks e-Power sends 143 hp to the front wheels from a 1.4-litre generator
The Kicks Nissan launched in Japan in June is the template: a 143 hp, 315 Nm electric motor drives the front wheels, and a 98 hp 1.4-litre three-cylinder petrol engine only generates electricity. It is the third-generation e-Power system the Qashqai received in 2025. Japan also sells an e-4ORCE version with a 68 hp rear motor, and quotes 3.9 l/100 km for the front-drive car on its own WLTC cycle. The car is 4,365 mm long on a 2,655 mm wheelbase and sits on the CMF-B platform the Juke already uses, which is why Sunderland can build it. Nissan has confirmed none of these figures for Europe, quoted no price and given no date.
Nissan pledged up to £2 billion for three electric cars at Sunderland; the Kicks gets £170 million
In November 2023 Nissan committed up to £2 billion to Sunderland for an electric Qashqai, an electric Juke and the new Leaf. The Leaf has been in production since December 2025 and the electric Juke follows next year. The electric Qashqai is gone: development stopped in early 2025, a Jatco factory for its three-in-one drive unit was cancelled, and if the project is ever revived the car will not arrive before the early 2030s, according to a Reuters report in June that cited six sources. Nissan cited volatile European EV demand and gave hybrids priority; the Kicks is that priority, at under a tenth of the 2023 sum.
Sunderland built 273,174 cars in 2025, about half its 2019 output
The plant made more than 500,000 cars in 2019 and 273,174 in 2025, and it is closing one of its two production lines in the second half of this year, moving Qashqai, Juke and Leaf onto the remaining line on three shifts. The Kicks will join them there. Line 1 is not being demolished: Nissan signed a memorandum with Chery in June for the Chinese group to build cars on it from the 2027 fiscal year, the deal that puts Chinese badges on British-built cars. Nissan counts £5 billion invested, 12 million vehicles and about 6,000 direct jobs at Sunderland. A fourth Nissan model is the cheapest way to defend those jobs while Chery fills the other building.
The Juke goes electric-only in 2027, so the Kicks becomes Nissan's hybrid B-SUV
The third-generation Juke that Sunderland starts building next year is electric only, which leaves the current Juke Hybrid, a 143 hp car using Renault's E-Tech system, without a successor. The Kicks e-Power makes the same 143 hp, is 155 mm longer than the 4,210 mm Juke and 60 mm shorter than the 4,425 mm Qashqai, and uses Nissan's own hybrid rather than Renault's. Read that way, the Kicks is the combustion Juke's replacement in everything but name, and the Juke badge moves to the electric car Nissan revealed in April. It also spreads a European business that leans on one car: the Qashqai accounted for around 45 percent of Nissan's roughly 330,000 European sales in 2025.
1.8 million Kicks sold in 70 countries, and 200,000 Qashqai e-Powers built in Sunderland
The Kicks was created in 2016 with Brazil as its lead market. The second generation arrived in 2024 from Mexico for North America, and Japan received the e-Power version in June from ¥2,999,700. Europe is the last major region to get it. Sunderland has already built 200,000 of the 1.9 million e-Power cars Nissan has sold worldwide since 2016, including the one that covered 1,980 km on a single tank, so both the powertrain and the platform are on site. The Kicks lands a week before the 23 September reveal of the Pixo, a Renault Twingo underneath, built in Slovenia: two European additions in a month, one built by Nissan, one by Renault.
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A £170 million hybrid is what Nissan can afford at Sunderland in 2026, and the announcement reads better once you accept that. The 2023 plan was three electric cars and up to £2 billion; the 2026 version is two electric cars, one hybrid and a Chinese tenant on the spare line. That is not a retreat from the plant. It is a retreat from the idea that the plant's future was electric, made by the company that started mass-market EVs with the Leaf in 2010 and now pins its European hybrid strategy on a petrol generator.
Nissan has given the Kicks no date, no price and no European power figure, and those three gaps set the deadline. The electric Juke enters production in 2027 and the current Juke Hybrid has no announced life beyond it; if the Kicks is not on sale by then, Sunderland spends a year with no hybrid B-SUV on the single line it just consolidated. Nissan owes buyers a date, a price under the Qashqai e-Power and a homologated 143 hp before the Juke Hybrid's last build day in 2027. Miss any of the three and the tenth model becomes a gap, not a replacement.
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