Renault is the diesel specialist for Alliance and produces some of the car industry’s top-performing diesel engines at its plant in Cleon, France. Nissan uses these engines to accelerate sales throughout Europe, where it has already become the number one Asian brand in many key markets.

Helped by this strong demand from Nissan, up to 300 million euros is being invested in the Cleon plant, in part to boost production capacity of one of Renault’s core engines – the Energy DCI 130. Capacity will be increased to 200,000 units a year in 2013, up from 150,000 units today.