Nissan

• 1. Introduction

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  In November 2024, a Nissan executive told the Financial Times that Nissan would cease to exist in "12 to 14 months" without a turnaround. Nissan is a Japanese automaker headquartered in Yokohama. In 2017, it ranked as the sixth largest car company in the world.

  Its vehicles are sold under the Nissan and Infiniti brands, and for decades under the Datsun name as well. Its in-house tuning shops, Nismo and Autech, build performance versions of its cars.

  How does a company at that height end up with its own executive predicting its disappearance? The answer starts long before Yokohama, with a truck maker in Tokyo. It involves a stock-market abbreviation, a borrowed British engine, a fight with a union, and a rescue that came from France.

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• 2. Three Surnames and a Son

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  On the 1st of July 1911, Masujiro Hashimoto founded the Kwaishinsha Motor Car Works in the Azabu-Hiroo district of Tokyo. Its first car, built in 1914, was called the DAT. The name came from the surnames of three investors: Kenjiro Den, Rokuro Aoyama and Meitaro Takeuchi.

  The company changed its name to Kaishinsha Motorcar Co., Ltd. in 1918. In 1925 it became DAT Jidosha & Co., Ltd. Most of what it built was trucks, not passenger cars. Japan had almost no consumer market for cars, and the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake created heavy demand for disaster recovery work. The first DAT trucks, produced from 1918, were aimed at the military.

  A second firm followed a similar path in Osaka. Jitsuyo Jidosha Co., Ltd., whose first word means practical use or utility, built small trucks from parts and materials imported from the United States. In 1926 the Tokyo company merged with it. The Osaka firm had been established in 1919 as a Kubota subsidiary.

  In 1931 came a smaller car, the Datsun Type 11. The first spelling was "Datson", meaning "Son of DAT". Two years later, after a zaibatsu took control, the final syllable became "sun". The reason was linguistic. In Japanese, "son" also means loss.

  The same year, 1933, the firm was renamed Jidosha-Seizo Co., Ltd. and moved to Yokohama, the city it still calls home.

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• 3. A Stock Ticker Becomes a Name

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  In 1928, Yoshisuke Aikawa, also known by the nickname Gisuke Ayukawa, founded a holding company called Nihon Sangyo, or Japan Industries. The word Nissan began as a shorthand for that company on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in the 1930s. The group included Tobata Casting and Hitachi. It controlled foundries and auto parts firms, but Aikawa did not enter car manufacturing until 1933.

  At its peak the zaibatsu grew to 74 firms. During World War II it was the fourth largest in Japan. Its road into cars ran through Tobata Casting. DAT Jidosha Seizo became affiliated with Tobata in 1931 and was merged into it in 1933.

  Aikawa then split the expanding auto parts division off in 1934 as a new subsidiary, Nissan Motor Co., Ltd. Its shareholders doubted that the automobile had a future in Japan. In June 1934, he bought out every Tobata Casting shareholder, using capital from Nihon Industries.

  The Yokohama plant was finished in 1935. That year, 44 Datsuns shipped to Asia and to Central and South America. The first car from an integrated assembly system also rolled off the line. Nissan built trucks, airplanes and engines for the Imperial Japanese Army.

  In November 1937, the headquarters moved to Xinjing, the capital of Manchukuo, and the company became Manchuria Heavy Industries Developing Co. By 1944 the head office was back in Nihonbashi, Tokyo, under the name Nissan Heavy Industries, Ltd. That name lasted until 1949.

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• 4. Borrowed Blueprints

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  Aikawa's 1908 visit to Detroit shaped Nissan's future. The man who carried out his plan to use cutting-edge American technology was William R. Gorham, an American engineer. DAT had inherited him as chief designer from Kubota.

  Most of the early machinery and processes came from the United States. In 1937, when Nissan began assembling larger vehicles under its own name, the Graham-Paige Company supplied much of the design plans and plant facilities. Nissan also held a Graham license for passenger cars, buses and trucks.

  David Halberstam, writing in his 1986 book The Reckoning, said that "In terms of technology, Gorham was the founder of the Nissan Motor Company". He added that young engineers who had never met Gorham spoke of him as a god.

  Britain supplied the next lesson. From 1934, Datsun built the Austin 7 under license, which became the greatest success of Austin's overseas licensing of that car. In 1952, a new agreement had Nissan assemble 2,000 Austins from imported partly assembled kits and sell them in Japan under the Austin name. Nissan had to make every Austin part locally within three years, and it did. By 1955 the Austin A50 was entirely Nissan-built, with a new 1489 cc engine. Nissan produced 20,855 Austins from 1953 to 1959.

  The deal also granted rights to Austin patents. Nissan used them to design its own engines. The Austin-derived line peaked with the new A series engine in 1966. In 1967 came the four-cylinder overhead cam Nissan L engine, which resembled Mercedes-Benz designs but was entirely Nissan's own.

  That engine powered the Datsun 510, which earned Nissan respect in sedans worldwide. In 1969, a six-cylinder version powered the Datsun 240Z sports car, an instant sensation that lifted Nissan to world-class status. That engine variant had been developed in 1964 under Nissan Machinery, a remnant of another carmaker, Kurogane.

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• 5. Strikes, Mergers and Fairladys

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  During the Korean War, Nissan was a major vehicle producer for the US Army. Once the war ended, the company fell into financial difficulty, and anti-communist feeling ran high in Japan. Its union was strong and militant. When wage talks arrived, management took a hard line. Workers were locked out, and several hundred were fired.

  The Japanese government and the US occupation forces arrested several union leaders. The union ran out of strike funds and lost. A new union formed, and one of its leaders was Shioji Ichiro, who had studied at Harvard University on a US government scholarship. He proposed trading wage cuts to save 2,000 jobs. That idea went into a new contract that put productivity first.

  The results were large. From 1955 to 1973, Nissan "expanded rapidly on the basis of technical advances supported - and often suggested - by the union". Ichiro went on to head the Confederation of Japan Automobile Workers' Unions. He became known as the most influential figure in the right wing of the Japanese labor movement.

  In 1966, Nissan merged with the Prince Motor Company. Prince brought upmarket cars, including the Skyline and Gloria, and front-wheel-drive expertise that Nissan lacked. That expertise produced the first-generation Cherry, also called the 100A, in 1971. The Skyline survives today as the G Series of Infiniti.

  Nissan also wanted to draw crowds after the 1964 Summer Olympics. It opened a gallery on the second and third floors of the San-ai building in Ginza, Tokyo. To bring visitors in, it held a competition to choose five women as the first class of Nissan Miss Fairladys. They were modeled on the "Datsun Demonstrators" of the 1930s. The Fairlady name borrowed from the popular Broadway play My Fair Lady, and the women became the marketers of the Datsun Fairlady 1500.

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• 6. Going Abroad

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  At the 1958 Los Angeles Auto Show, Nissan first showed the Datsun Bluebird to an American audience. Management had realized in the 1950s that the small Datsun cars met an unfilled need in markets such as Australia and the United States. A first car had been sold in Saudi Arabia in 1957. In 1960, Nissan formed Nissan Motor Corporation U.S.A. in Gardena, California, with Yutaka Katayama at its head. By 1970, Nissan was one of the world's largest car exporters.

  Factories followed the cars. Nissan Mexicana began manufacturing in 1966 at Cuernavaca, Nissan's first North American assembly plant. After the 1973 oil crisis, buyers everywhere, and especially in the lucrative US market, turned to high-quality small cars. The new Nissan Sunny met that demand, and the company built plants in Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, the United States and South Africa.

  The Smyrna plant in Tennessee broke ground in 1980. It first built trucks such as the Datsun 720 and the Nissan Hardbody. Later it added the Altima, Maxima, Rogue, Pathfinder, Infiniti QX60 and the all-electric Leaf. Passenger cars arrived in response to the Voluntary Export Restraints that the US government imposed in 1981.

  Europe was a different game. By the early 1980s, Nissan Datsun was the best-selling Japanese brand there. In 1980, a joint venture with Italy's state-owned Alfa Romeo led to Italian production of the Nissan Cherry and to an Alfa-badged version, the Arna.

  Later markets were enormous. Nissan opened a Brazilian plant in 2001. In 2005, with Renault, it invested $990 million in a factory at Chennai, India, to serve local buyers and export small cars to Europe. In 2009, a joint venture with Dongfeng sold nearly 520,000 new vehicles in China.

  One brand did not make the whole journey. The Datsun name was phased out in 1984, and by 1985 it was gone. Nissan relaunched it in July 2013 for emerging markets, after a 27-year hiatus. Sluggish sales ended it again in 2022.

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• 7. The Electric Bet

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  On the 29th of December 1997, Nissan showed its first battery electric vehicle, the Altra, at the Los Angeles International Auto Show. Nissan electric cars had been appearing intermittently since 1946, but the Leaf of 2010 was different. It was the first series-produced all-electric vehicle launched worldwide.

  The numbers climbed fast. Global Leaf sales hit 100,000 by mid-January 2014, a 45 percent share of the pure electric cars sold worldwide since 2010. They passed 200,000 in December 2015. By December 2020, ten years after launch, cumulative deliveries reached 500,000. The Leaf was the world's most sold plug-in electric car for nearly a decade. Until Tesla passed it, Nissan was the largest electric vehicle maker, with more than 320,000 sold as of April 2018.

  Factory automation came earlier. Nissan installed its first final assembly robots in 1982 at the Murayama plant, where the new March, sold abroad as the Micra, was being built. Robotization began at the Zama plant in 1984 and spread through its factories.

  In September 2013, a Leaf fitted with prototype driver-assistance software received a license plate allowing it to drive on Japanese public roads. In November 2013, it ran on the Sagami Expressway in Kanagawa Prefecture. Riding along were Nissan vice chairman Toshiyuki Shiga and the prefecture's governor, Yuji Kuroiwa.

  By 2018, Nissan had sold its battery unit AESC to Envision to focus on building vehicles. In February 2023, it announced its intent to produce electric vehicles with solid-state batteries by 2028.

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• 8. Rescue and Ruin

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  The Renault-Nissan Alliance was signed on the 27th of March 1999, the first of its kind between a Japanese and a French automaker. Nissan was in severe financial trouble. Renault bought a 36.8 percent stake for $3.5 billion, and Nissan vowed to buy into Renault once it could afford to.

  In June 2001, Renault executive Carlos Ghosn became Nissan's chief executive. His Nissan Revival Plan produced what many leading economists called one of the most spectacular corporate turnarounds in history. Japan's government awarded him the Japan Medal with Blue Ribbon in 2004, and manga told his story. In 2001 Nissan took a 15 percent share of Renault, and Renault raised its holding in Nissan to 43.4 percent.

  The fall was just as public. On the 19th of November 2018, Ghosn was fired as chairman after his arrest for allegedly under-reporting his income to Japanese financial authorities. He spent 108 days in detention. After 29 days on bail, he was detained again on new charges on the 4th of April 2019. His lawyers then released a video in which he argued that the scandal itself showed corporate mismanagement. By September 2019, Ghosn's successor, Hiroto Saikawa, had resigned amid allegations of improper payments.

  The cuts followed. From late July 2019, Nissan laid off 12,500 employees over three years, citing a 95 percent year-on-year fall in net income. In May 2020, the pandemic led it to cut production capacity by 20 percent. It closed factories in Indonesia and Spain and left South Korea. A Nissan North America spokesperson said the company had suffered from a strategy of "volume at any cost", which analysts tied to Ghosn.

  US sales had fallen by half between 2017 and 2024. Commentators blamed well-publicized reliability problems with the Xtronic CVT transmission and, to a lesser extent, the Rogue's four-wheel drive system. In November 2024, Nissan cut its annual operating profit forecast by 70 percent to 150 billion yen, about $975 million, and planned 9,000 job cuts.

  A rescue by a rival looked briefly possible. On the 23rd of December 2024, Nissan signed a memorandum of understanding to merge with Honda. In February 2025, the boards voted to end the talks, reportedly after Honda proposed that Nissan become a subsidiary.

  In March 2025, Ivan Espinosa was named chief executive from the 1st of April 2025, replacing Makoto Uchida. His plan is to close seven factories by 2027, cutting from 17 to 10, with 20,000 jobs lost. In April 2026, he announced that Nissan would cut its model range from 56 to 45.

  One bet is already scheduled. On the 12th of March 2026, Nissan, Uber and Wayve announced plans for a robotaxi pilot programme in Tokyo by late 2026.

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