<p>We are about to start a new part of the project and there doesn't seem to be a lot of interest in unit testing (and it doesn't feel like they have experienced TDD). I believe it's nearly essential and it makes maintainance much easier.
So what are your views?</p>

<p>Thanks</p>

<p>BTW: this is a language agnostic question, however the new project is in Java.</p>

Yes. We have been using TDD for a while now. Somehow TDD has grown found on us and we like this incremental approach in order to achieve better code quality. In spite of the initial denial curve where you think it will slow development having consistent and progressive unit testing while writing code is essential in many ways. Writing breaking changes is very difficult to happen because of the framework of regression testings that is being incrementally built. When done right the code is more robust and the confidence in the code and in the whole project is positively affected.
Writing unit tests nowadays is not for a mere elite. It should be every developer responsibility. The later a bug is found on the code the more it will cost to fix and harder it will be to find. This easily becomes a maintenance nightmare. Having a strong support of unit tests highly reduces this risk.
Combining the power of unit tests and TDD with a well configured continuous integration system allows for rapid discovery of problems in early phases of the project. A daily build is a must to avoid future and almost sure hassles.