Nissan SA hopes to start manufacturing its delayed Navarra bakkie in March or April 2021, MD Shinkichi Izumi said on Thursday.
Production should have started now, after a R3bn investment in the company’s Rosslyn, Tshwane assembly plant. The Covid-19 pandemic, however, has pushed it months behind schedule — first by closing the plant during lockdown and then by interrupting the arrival of machinery and technical staff from overseas.
Izumi said in an interview that all machinery, including robots and new press machines, are now in place after being installed by local engineers under the “virtual” online guidance of Japanese and Korean technicians in their own countries. Engineering evaluations are complete and Rosslyn is ready to start vehicle production trials before the end of the year.
The Navarra will be the first new vehicle range to be built at Rosslyn for 13 years. It will join the Hard body one-ton bakkie and smaller NP200, both of which have been produced there for many years and will continue for the foreseeable future. In the long term, the Navarra is intended to replace Hard body.
Until now, the imported Navarra has been available in SA only as a double-cab. Rosslyn will build both single- and double-cab versions, setting it in direct competition with the likes of Toyota Hilux and Ford Ranger.
That competition will not only be in the domestic market. Nissan SA already exports Hard body kits for reassembly in Nigeria and Izumi said talks have begun on doing the same in Ghana and Kenya. No decision has been made yet but it is likely that Navarra, not Hard body, will go to these countries.
There is also preliminary talk of exporting Navarra to Europe, where SA-built Hiluxes and Rangers are bestsellers.
Nissan SA will welcome rapid growth in sales of all its vehicles. Rosslyn has annual production capacity of 45,000 vehicles on a single shift. In 2019 it built 33,000 and this year the number will be considerably less. Under the proposed terms of the government’s new motor industry policy, the SA Automotive Masterplan, companies building fewer than 50,000 will not be able to access investment incentives.
Izumi hopes demand will allow him to introduce a second assembly shift after Navarra’s launch next year. When the R3bn investment was announced in his presence in 2019, President Cyril Ramaphosa hailed it as a validation of his foreign investment drive and of automotive policy.
The master plan is due to start in less than three months, on January 1, but Izumi has joined fellow industry executives in asking the government to delay it for six months. Besides that Covid-19 continues to disrupt everyone’s activities, the government’s failure, even at this late stage, to publish precise details of how the plan will work, has everyone worried they won’t be ready for January.
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