Britain owes Nissan of Japan a long-overdue thank you – for being the largest car producer we have in the UK. If you drive south from the firm’s impressive Sunderland factory to its Rickmansworth head office, it takes about five hours.
Travel east in a car from Dover to Selfkant (one of the closest German towns) and the journey time is remarkably similar – assuming the cross-Channel ferries and Chunnel behave themselves.
It can often feel like we Brits and our ‘distant’ German neighbours live and work in different worlds. But the English road trip between Nissan’s Tyne and Wear factory and its Hertfordshire admin centre is 274 miles. Yet a multi-country car journey – including the sea crossing – from Dover to Selfkant in Germany’s western quarter is 20 miles shorter.
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