JAPANESE car firm Honda has become the UK's second highest selling Japanese car producer, overtaking Nissan.

Toyota still remains number one.

The company, which has its main UK manufacturing plant at South Marston near Swindon, saw their 2004 UK passenger vehicle sales increase by more than 11 per cent over 2003 to 91,241 units.

This was just over a 1,000 units more than Nissan whose new car sales fell by almost 15 per cent.

Toyota's UK passenger car sales were 121,000, an increase of three per cent.

Ken Keir, managing director of Honda UK, said: "The whole basis of our growth plan has come from our products being of high quality with impeccable reliability and maintaining really good residual values.

"There is always a demand from the British public to buy Honda vehicles. Seventy per cent of our customers are retail buyers".

Global sales of the CR-V, which is built in Swindon, have now topped the two million mark and annual sales exceed 250,000 units of which 40,000 are in Europe.

In Britain 13,000 CR-V vehicles were sold in 2004 and this year Honda expect that figure to increase to 25,000 with the introduction of the new 2.2-litre diesel variants.

However as the petrol versions have the option of an automatic transmission and the new diesel models do not, Honda say that 57 per cent of CR-V sales will be petrol models. Seventy per cent of CR-V diesel sales will come from conquest customers say Honda.