Hundreds of jobs may be going at Peugeot's Coventry factory and the axe hangs over hundreds more at the Rover facility in Birmingham, but Britain remains one of the world's biggest car exporters. Nigel Burton reports.

IT is hard to believe, but Britain has become the world's favourite car maker. The doommongers of the 1980s have been proved spectacularly wrong.

Indigenous manufacturers may be down to dogged old MG-Rover, but the great names of the past, such as Triumph, Austin and Morris, have been replaced by vibrant, new factories, run by the Japanese and Germans.

Now Britain is poised to overtake Germany as Europe's biggest exporter of cars.

Britain is also home to three of the most productive car factories in the world - Nissan, in Sunderland, Honda, in Swindon, and Toyota, in Burnaston, Derbyshire.

And for some time, Nissan Sunderland has been exporting its cars to Japan. Talk about coals to Newcastle.

Nissan's plant is already the largest in the UK. The arrival of two models in the next couple of years will see it pull away from rivals still further, with more than 300,000 vehicles rolling off the production line.

Honda has more than doubled production at Swindon since 2000, and is on course to produce 250,000 units. Production at Toyota UK topped 200,000 last year.

The Japanese success has been mirrored at the Mini plant, in Oxford, where the production line has been running flat out since the BMW-produced car went on sale.

Things are also looking up at Land Rover, in Solihull, Bentley, in Crewe, and Rolls-Royce, at Goodwood.

Experts estimate that by the end of this decade, the UK will be making more cars than at any time since the 1970s, when a record 1.9 million cars left factories across the Midlands.

This is good news for Britain's balance of payments, because the motor industry these days is a net exporter. About 70 per cent of the 1.7 million cars made in the UK are exported.

The only significant difference is that Britain's volume manufacturing is now under overseas control. When MG-Rover falls to the Chinese, there will be no British-owned mass manufacturers left in the UK.

This is one of the reasons Britain is now a good place to do business.

According to the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, the UK is unique in being home to so many of the world's largest car companies.

Even the UK's place outside the Eurozone has failed to hold the country back. Nissan - for so long the biggest critic of Britain's decision to keep the pound - said the issue was no longer important to its strategic planning.

Even better, the UK is not just a good place to make cars, it seems as if the public cannot buy enough of them.

So, unlike in Europe and the US, manufacturers here have not been forced to resort to costly incentives to boost flagging sales.