DAVID MOSS

Nissan's engineering chief has overseen the groundbreaking Qashqai since its inception. Steve Cropley meets him

- Steve Cropley

There's a wide, picture-lined corridor inside Nissan's European technical HQ at Cranfield, Bedfordshire, that connects the front offices with a much larger complex of technical installations to the rear, where all of the serious car creation takes place: engine cells, laboratories, sound chambers and rigs for many different forms of durability testing can be found there.

One of the pictures, faded with the years, shows six or seven freshfaced young men, Nissan's intake of graduate engineers for 1990 in their second week of employment. Today, amazingly, four of them are still on Nissan's payroll and all are now highly placed in an organisation that has always put company loyalty on the same high plane as ability. The most accomplished of them has the widest smile: he is David Moss, for the past five years Nissan's senior vice-president in charge of R&D for Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Oceania.

As Nissan's chief engineer for most of the important regions this side of Japan, Moss's accomplishments are many across a stellar 34-year career. But the one achievement Autocar especially seeks to honour with this year's Mundy Award for Engineering is Moss's invaluable work in creating and nurturing the British-built Nissan Qashqai, the pioneering SUV whose production has recently passed four million units in the three generations that have been launched since 2007, and whose fourth generation, likely to be launched in 2027, will be a pure EV.