AS the second shift clocked on for work at the Peugeot factory in Ryton, Coventry, last week, no one had any inkling that company managers were on their way to deliver bad news.

Although none of the staff were in any doubt that the ageing plant was fighting for its future, they believed the short-term future was secure. They were very wrong.

A dramatic fall in sales of new cars across Europe had left the French outpost vulnerable to any cost-cutting moves by Peugeot bosses.

Ryton is an old factory. When I visited - during the launch of the 306 model - I was struck by just how old-fashioned the processes were compared to the Nissan plant in Sunderland.

Despite the best efforts of a dedicated workforce, Ryton has been living on borrowed time. The die was cast when the factory failed to win a contract to manufacture the 207 hatchback.

At the time, Peugeot bosses tried to put a brave face on it. They said Ryton's short-term prospects were good because the factory would become the world-wide production base for the new model's predecessor, the 206, which would remain on sale.

But that was then. In the harsh economic reality of 2006, sales of the 206 were tumbling fast.

Worse, Ryton's factory only bought a relatively small number of components locally. The factory was essentially an assembly area. Shipping bits and pieces across the English Channel was prohibitively expensive.

In the end, there was no logic in keeping an ageing factory going when cars could be made more cheaply elsewhere.

So the decision was taken to end production in two phases. The factory that began its life making Hillmans, then Chryslers and eventually two decades of Peugeots, will soon be no more.

Union bosses - taken by surprise - blamed the Government. They said job losses on a similar scale in France would be unthinkable, partly because it costs so much more to make a French worker redundant (on average £100,000).

They conveniently ignored the wave of factory closures and redundancies sweeping the car industry at the moment - more than 50,000 in the US alone.

And when the final Peugeot rolls off the line at Ryton, the day will be more of a footnote in history than another nail in the coffin containing the British car industry.

The Coventry plant's closure will bring to an end more than a century of car making.

Once upon a time, only Detroit in the US could boast more car manufacturers.

In the past 100 years, scores have come and now they have all gone. Hillman and Triumph departed years ago, Jaguar has closed its gates, MG Rover has collapsed and now Peugeot is leaving. Only Manganese Bronze, the company that makes London cabs, remains.

But the UK's car industry is still in rude health.

Last year, annual production was only a few hundred thousand short of the all-time high in the early 1970s, when Britain was one of the world's biggest car makers.

The old factories have been swept aside, but in their place the Japanese have brought new technology and new investment.

Nissan in Sunderland is the continent's most productive car plant and the biggest single producer of cars in this country. Honda, at Swindon, and Toyota, in Derbyshire, are not far behind.

Even the Mini factory - at an old Rover site in Oxford - is working 24 hours a day to satisfy demand.

Last year, it made 200,000 vehicles - a huge improvement on the original estimate of only 50,000. This year, it is on course to make a quarter of a million Minis.

Peugeot's decision may have come as a shock, but the stark truth is that its closure will make barely a ripple as far as the UK car manufacturing industry as a whole is concerned.