THE TRUTH ABOUT NITRA
THE announcement was made exactly a year ago that the new Defender was to be built at JLR’s new state-of-the-art facility in Nitra, Slovakia. It took an investment of ¤1.4bn to create the impressive 300,000m² facility. On October 25, 2018, production of the Discovery begun at Nitra as it was a known engineering quantity and they needed to get the factory up and running and new Defender ready. Despite the fact that JLR were the first UK car company to open a plant in Slovakia, many more from other countries, have come before them and stayed.
Did you know that since 2007 Slovakia is the biggest global producer of cars per capita? They produce an astonishing 202 cars per 1000 inhabitants. They built 1.1 million cars in 2019, which is more than JLR produced in the same year. In fact, car manufacturing makes up nearly 50 per cent of the industry in Slovakia. More importantly it directly creates 177,000 jobs and indirectly over a quarter of a million. Incredible figures really.
Despite the above facts, which I have to say I was unaware
