Submitted by Taps Coogan on the 8th of May 2018 to The Sounding Line.

Despite having once been home to many popular global car brands such as Land Rover, Jaguar, Rolls Royce, Bentley, Mini, MG and many others, all of the UK’s major car brands have long been bought up by foreign competitors. Nonetheless, the UK remains a significant manufacturer of cars and roughly 79% of cars produced in the country are exported abroad, as the following graphic from Statista.com shows.

You will find more infographics at Statista

While Brexit negotiations continue to bear little fruit, inconveniently for the UK, the EU remains the most important customer for UK produced automobiles. In fact, over 50% of British car exports go to the EU. As Statista notes:

“For the UK car industry, a lot is riding on the type of Brexit that we end up with. As well as the potential loss of foreign investment in a sector already extremely reliant upon it, the loss of, or damage to, trade with the European Union would be devastating. As Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) data shows, the EU is the largest importer of our cars – and by a huge margin. In the latest period measured, 56% of our exports went to countries within the EU. The second-placed USA took only 14.5% of our vehicles, while the third largest recipient was China at 6.5%.”

With no major domestically owned brands and with Nissan now the largest automotive producer in the country, it is hard to imagine patriotic loyalty keeping much automotive manufacturing in the UK if it no longer makes good business sense. Fortunately for the UK, it is also a major export destination for the EU’s automotive industry, which sends roughly 12% of its exports to the UK and maintains net automotive imports with the EU.

Hopefully a mutually beneficial deal will be worked out.

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