Nissan Europe (www.nissan-europe.com) capped a record-breaking 2017 with the production of the three millionth Nissan Qashqai in the UK, just over a decade after the vehicle made its debut.

This achievement by Nissan’s Sunderland Plant came as the company posted its best ever full-year European sales — a total of 762,574 Datsun and Nissan models (an increase of 3.8% on 2016).

Nissan says the Qashqai played a pivotal role in helping the company achieve these results, as the model had another record-breaking year, with sales growing by 1.2%.

The Sunderland Plant produced a record 346,856 units of the urban crossover, 265,520 of which were sold in Europe for 3.7% of the European market share.

The strongest markets were Spain (9.4% sales growth), France (3% sales growth) and Russia (12.4% sales growth).

Paul Willcox, chairman of Nissan Europe, said: “2017 was another record-breaking year for Nissan Europe, and 2018 has started the same way.

The Qashqai’s achievement of reaching 3 million vehicles produced in 10 years is a significant milestone, while the October launch of the new Nissan LEAF has seen record-breaking pre-orders — one every 10min.”

Mr Willcox said Nissan expects to see further records broken in 2018, with total industry sales in Europe and Russia rising by about 2% to 20.2 million vehicles.

Nissan expects the European market to grow by 1% to 18.4 million vehicles and Russia’s market to increase by 7% to 1.8 million.

In October 2016, Nissan announced that the production of an all-new third-generation Qashqai would also be at the Sunderland plant, which began making the next-generation LEAF in December; it also makes the Juke crossover and the Infiniti Q30 and QX30 premium models.

Employment in Nissan’s UK design studio (Paddington, London), technical centre (Cranfield, Bedfordshire), manufacturing plant (Sunderland, Tyne and Wear) and sales and marketing operations (Maple Cross, Hertfordshire) now totals more than 8,000.

A further 28,000 jobs in Nissan’s UK supply chain and 4,000 in its UK dealer network takes the total number of British jobs supported by Nissan to more than 40,000.