Six thousand people go to work every morning at the Nissan plant in Sunderland. It's the biggest car factory in Britain, it's been building Qashqais and Jukes on Wearside for forty years — and right now roughly half of it is standing idle. So Nissan has signed an agreement with a Chinese company to fill the empty line. From 2027, the biggest car factory in this country could be building Chery cars. Chinese brands took 15% of the British new car market in the first half of 2026 — around 175,000 cars. Two years ago BYD had only just launched here and Chery Group didn't exist in Britain at all. The Jaecoo 7 was the best-selling car in the country outright in March, ahead of the Ford Puma and the Nissan Qashqai. In July, Chery on its own outsold Honda and Mazda combined. In this video we count down ten British car plants and what happened to every one of them — Ford Bridgend, Honda Swindon, Vauxhall Luton, Jaguar Castle Bromwich, MG Rover Longbridge, and the JLR sites at Solihull, Halewood and Wolverhampton. Number one is still open. That's the problem. Longbridge is the part most people have forgotten, and it's the reason Sunderland matters. A British car company fails. A Chinese company buys the badge. The factory carries on for a while building cars for the new owner. Then it stops. Twenty-one years later, MG is the largest Chinese brand in Britain and outsells the British brands it used to be. We also cover the Freelander — a British nameplate now licensed to Chery as a standalone Chinese brand, with the UK explicitly in scope — and what the Sunderland deal would actually mean if it goes ahead. Including the case for it, which Unite has made publicly and which deserves a fair hearing. Note: the Nissan–Chery agreement is a non-binding memorandum of understanding. Discussions are ongoing and it may not happen at all. Did you work at one of these plants, or did somebody in your family? Type the number one in the comments. Subscribe for UK car news every week — collapsing brands, dead models, and what's really happening to the cars we drive. #nissan #sunderland #chery #ukcars #carnews Covered: Nissan Sunderland plant, Chery UK, Jaecoo 7, Chinese cars UK market share, MG Rover Longbridge closure, Honda Swindon closure, Ford Bridgend, Vauxhall Luton, Jaguar Castle Bromwich, JLR cyber attack, Freelander Chery, British car manufacturing, BYD UK, Omoda, UK car factory closures
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