Renault’s Le Mans plant to make chassis for next-gen Nissan Micra

In late 2016, the Le Mans plant is to start making chassis components for the next-generation Nissan Micra. This program will bring an increase of around 8 percent in the plant workload, and draw an investment budget totalling €7 million (Rs 55 crore). 

The Le Mans plant will meet all the Nissan Micra chassis needs for the Renault Flins plant (near Paris), which will manufacture the new Micra from 2016 onwards, with an expected output of 132,000 vehicles per year. Thus Renault will be building the whole chassis for Micra in France, and assembling the car in France as well.

Nissan's decision to have the new Micra chassis made at Renault's Le Mans plant follows the competitive performance agreement of 13 March 2013, which enabled the Renault Le Mans plant to successfully challenge rival production facilities as regards fulfilment of Nissan's performance demands.

Le Mans is the Renault group's primary chassis design and manufacturing centre. As well as being used on Renault-badged vehicles, the chassis assemblies made at the Le Mans plant also appear on European-made Dacias and Nissans.

The Le Mans centre is currently involved in practically all of the Renault group's forthcoming product projects, and makes chassis components for Clio 4, Captur and New Trafic, plus Lodgy, Sandero and Duster for Dacia, and Qashqai and Note for Nissan. It makes all the chassis parts for ZOE (rear axle, rotating front-end, subframe, bottom arm), plus the battery support and engine cradle.

The parts made at Le Mans are dispatched to Renault group assembly plants not only in France and other European countries, but also farther afield, to Turkey, Morocco and Brazil. The Le Mans plant exports 55 percent of its production output outside France and 25 percent outside Europe.

In announcing phase two of Renault's Drive the Change in February 2014, Carlos Ghosn, president of the Renault-Nissan Alliance, emphasized the need to improve the performance of both partner companies, and one of the ways this was to be achieved was by developing cross-manufacturing, with one partner making vehicles or powertrains for the other. Just months after the announcement, Alliance synergies are stepping up; the Micra chassis programme for Le Mans marks a major step forward in Alliance cross-manufacturing.