labour. nissan has announced a major expansion of electric vehicle production at its car plant in sunderland, which will create more than 1600 newjobs don t like the japanese carmaker says it will build its new generation of electric models there with batteries on site. these are the new engines of the world automotive economy. a new battery factory will make 100,000 of them a year, to be fitted to a brand new model at a plant supplied by its own renewable energy grid. a £1 billion investment, creating over 6,000 jobs here and in the supply chain. today we re announcing the world s first manufacturing ecosystem, in sunderland, because of the skill and competencies of our workforce and the competitiveness of this plant. and i do believe that sunderland will become our flagship business model to apply