GLOOMY car industry predictions have been smashed by Nissan with its North-East plant to make a record number of vehicles this year and 22,500 new Juke models sold before the first one rolled off the production line yesterday.

The Sunderland plant expects to produce 400,000 vehicles overall in 2010, and 100,000 Jukes in the next 12 months, based on the strong pre-orders.

As Juke production began yesterday, safeguarding 1,100 jobs, Trevor Mann, Nissan’s senior vice-president for manufacturing in Europe, revealed the plant would create 75 advanced apprenticeships in the next five years, as well as extending its educational outreach programme for schools until 2014.

Last night, trade bodies and the Government hailed the plant, which also produces the best-selling Qashqai, as proof British manufacturing was alive and well.

It comes despite doomsayers predictions that the end of the Government’s scrappage scheme, in March, would hit the car industry hard and new car sales falling last month for the first time in a year.

Mr Mann said: “I think what we have seen through the recession, and seen through Qashqai, is that if you have a good product, keenly priced, people will buy them.

“Obviously at the end of 2008 and beginning of last year, people didn’t know what the world was about and everyone was affected.

“But from the middle of last year, Qashqai got back to prerecession levels and we believe Juke is a special car.”

The Juke is the sixth new car to roll off the Sunderland production line in the past eight years while the Leaf electric car will also be built there from 2013.

Mr Mann said: “It is not a surprise. It is something we have worked very hard to achieve, no one gets anything given, we earn everything. We have made sure this plant is competitive, technically competent and our people are the best trained and motivated people to deliver what we need to maintain a viable plant.”

And he believed the plant showed the strength of British manufacturing skills and pointed out that with the pound’s weakness following the recession there had never been a better time for companies to base European production here.

He said: “I sincerely believe the UK is a good place to manufacture.

“We are proving it every day ourselves and there has never been a better time to bang that drum.

“I think the UK is a good place to make things and we should do more of it.”

Nissan hopes the Juke, which replaces Micra production at Sunderland, will replicate the success of Qashqai which, having been predicted to sell 100,000 a year, has sold more than 500,000 since its launch three years ago.

Dr Colin Herron, manufacturing and productivity manager at regional development agency One North East, said: “The region is at the forefront of car manufacturing and this builds on the success of the Qashqai.

“The Micra is going to India and this is its replacement so it is securing jobs and if it is as successful as the Qashqai may even create jobs.”

Andrew Sugden, policy director at the North-East Chamber of Commerce said: “It’s great news for Sunderland and the North-East.”

Phil Kite, regional chairman of manufacturers’ organisation EEF, said: “It is great news for Nissan and excellent news for many North- East companies in the supply chain. This demonstrates that local skills continue to be recognised as world class.”

Further Education and Skills Minister John Hayes, who was at the plant yesterday, said: “It represents the best of what Britain can do, there is a lot of good manufacturing in Britain.”