Automakers spend huge sums of money to establish factories, and kit them out to mass produce hundreds of thousands of vehicles each year. Workers then invest blood, sweat, and tears to keep them running. When times get tough, car companies often find themselves making difficult decisions on what they can keep and what they have to cut loose. For Nissan, it’s looking likely the Japanese automaker will have to close several plants as it tries to shore up its finances for the future.
Nissan’s struggles are not breaking news. Last year, we noted the brand was in terrible shape, albeit with some hope of recovery. The company has tangled with falling sales for some time now, but has been laying the groundwork for its resurgence with a raft of new models, particularly at the more affordable end of the market.
As it stands, though, major automakers are huge, lumbering things and it takes a great deal of time and money for them to change direction. In an effort to stem the bleeding and support the recovery, Nissan has decided a number of factories will have to close.
As reported by Automotive News, it appears Nissan’s Civac factory in Jiutepec, Mexico, will be shutting down, following the closing of the Oppama plant in Japan. First opened in 1966, it was Nissan’s very first factory established outside Japan. It started out producing the Bluebird, while more recently, the production lines were tasked with building the Navara pickup as well as Frontiers for Latin American markets. It’s expected to shut down by March 2027 at the latest.
In 2024, Civac produced just 80,000 pickups, well under a third of its full output capacity. That number is slated to shrink to only 57,000 vehicles in 2025. The numbers are well shy of what the plant was doing as recently as 2016, when it turned out a full 294,000 vehicles over the calendar year.
Large, sprawling factories are expensive to run and maintain. If all that space and machinery is going unused, it’s costing money instead of making money, and it’s hard to justify its continued existence. According to a source speaking to Automotive News, the Civac factory is outdated, which doesn’t help matters. Instead of overhauling the plant at great expense, Nissan is expected to transfer existing production to its factories at Aguascalientes. It will take advantage of production capacity freed up by dropping various Sentra and Kicks trims for the US market that weren’t proving profitable in the current tariff environment.
Civac isn’t the only factory facing the end of the line. Nissan plans to close seven plants worldwide by the 2027 financial year. As mentioned, the Oppama plant will be closed down, with production shifted to the company’s factory at Kyushu. Argentina, and India will also see some Nissan facilities shutting down, with South Africa and Thailand also expected to face closures. Overall, Nissan will likely keep just 10 of its current 17 factories, with its total production capacity dropping from 3.5 million to 2.5 million units, not including Chinese operations. The hope is that by consolidating production into fewer facilities, utilization rates will be higher, costs will be lower, and the company will be able to operate in a more profitable manner.
The reason behind all this? Earlier this year, Nissan posted its worst financial results in a long time, with a net loss of  ¥670.9 billion (~$4.6 billion USD) in its last full financial year. This comes as little surprise, given the demand issues that Nissan has faced in recent years. In financial year 2014, when Nissan sold 5.3 million vehicles worldwide. Those numbers remained strong right up until 2018, when Nissan sold a mighty 5.5 million vehicles. Then the drop started, hard and fast. In the financial year 2024, Nissan shifted just 3.3 million vehicles, a 40% drop compared to just six years ago.
Nissan executives have accepted that it’s not prudent to maintain so many factories when it’s not selling enough cars to keep all the production lines running. Consolidation is a reasonable way forward, but at a great cost, not only to Nissan’s peak production in future, but also to the swathes of workers who will be looking for new jobs in the years to come. Ultimately, it’s tough out there. Only time will tell whether Nissan can weather the storm.
Image credits: Nissan
Nissan always made a great car but those transmissions killed their reputation.The dealership experience didn’t help much either.
Related question: Was the large Nissan pickup truck named in honor of the football team located near the factory, or was the football team named after the truck?
Titans football was named in 1999 and the pickup started in 2004.
Much like Lexus vs Infiniti in the luxury league, Tundra vs Titan in pickups could only have one winner and it was the Toyota group.
The biggest issue is that Nissan is now a damaged brand. Its now seen as the brand of car you get when you have really bad credit. Those awful Jatco CVT transmissions aren’t helping either.
It’s hard to stand out in a CUV world where everything is an amorphous grey blob. They appear to be spiraling the bowl into Mitsubishi territory. A company that once made desirable vehicles that is now an afterthought.
Nissan showed off the IDx 10 years ago to overwhelmingly positive reviews, so what do they do? Keep pumping out the same old garbage. Good riddance Nissan.
The point about Nissan’s China operations being excluded is interesting. In 2020 and 2021, the Nissan Sylphy (aka Sentra) was the best selling vehicle in the entire Chinese market, with 550k and 500k units sold respectively; that’s 2.85% and 2.45% of the entire car market! The Sylphy seems to have a similar reputation to the Toyota Corolla there, an affordable, reliable, cheap to repair, unkillable cockroach car. Additionally, older generations remember how bad Chinese cars were not very long ago and are wary of buying popular PHEV/EV newcomers like the BYD Qin or XPeng Mona M03 and Chinese legacy brand bestsellers like the Geely Emgrand or Changan Lamore.
However, sales have been dropping albeit slowly, with 445k, 375k, and 342k in ’22-24, which still puts it at 5th place in the overall Chinese market despite its age. It will be interesting to see if the new gen next year will save its sales, or if they’ll continue to decline as the NEV market matures. Nissan’s first attempts at making Chinese-based EVs seems to be going well, as the Nissan N7 mid-size sedan EV got a really high amount of pre-orders for a legacy JV brand in China.
That is a lovely light purple/pink color on that last car.
And I do love my 2014 nissan Pulsar, the room in the back is limousine level. It’s really sad that they stopped making that model.
I agree, I want that color on my next car
So Nissan’s in…erm…hot water in Mexico?
I honestly only knew about VW’s early offshoring work in Mexico, I had no idea Nissan was building cars there as early as the mid-60s. That’s really early in the scope of the broader “Japanese Invasion” that plagued the Big 3 here.
And in other news, France’s glam puss culture minister, Rachida Dati, formerly interior minister under Sarkozy (used to ring him at 2.00am when he was in bed with Carla..) has been sent to trial on corruption allegations dating from two years she “worked” for Renault – Nissan’s shady Dutch HQ, for which she was paid €900,000.
Trouble is she already had a job as an Euro MP, and asked car industry questions during that time.
And no-one can find much trace of actual, you know, work…
She is very combative about it all, and points out the timing is very convenient to scupper her bid to become mayor of Paris next year.
More dirty Renault and Nissan laundry to come!
Of course Carlos Ghosn is meant to be the corrupter, which is convenient for the investigating judges as he dare not step out of Lebanon for risk of going straight back to his bowl of rice a day regime in Tokyo.
Nissan’s move to have four vehicles developed from one front cradle (not even really a platform, since damn near everything they has shares parts to that extent) is probably a driving reason for this. The Kicks, Rogue, Juke and Sentry all share the CFM, which means they all get the same three engines and same transmission. That knocks out two plants right there, one for the automatics and one for the small engines, and means Descherd and Fukuoka can handle everything by themselves. Adding to that is that they’ve killed the Maxima and Sentra Note, freeing up the Smyrna plant for bigger stuff like the current Pathfinder, getting rid of the additional line in Canton. Then there’s the fact that Infiniti’s basically dead, and all they sell is the QX80 and some little bits of the QX50, meaning Canton can take on all the additional load that they normally wouldn’t have been able to handle previously.
And this is all just in the U.S. alone.
I thought Infinity just made clapped out G35s with bubbling window tint and expired tags. Have to look for these QX80s you speak of on the road.
Infinity goes on forever. Infiniti appears to be near the end.
So where’s the Ariya going to be made? If I were forced to get a Nissan, that would be the only one I’d be interested in. The only problem with that is there’s no place to charge where I live.
I’m on a Quest to buy out the entire Nissan company, that way I can have it Altima self. I’ll be the Sentra of attention.
Victor Kiam, is that you?
For those of you to young to remember, he did commercials where he claimed to like the Remington Microscreen shaver so much, he bought the company.
I salute you in your Quest and hope you can realize your dream to lead Nissan into a new Frontier; a Titan of industry.
I’ll start by manufacturing different types of products—di-Versa-fication is key.
Let me ask my Fairlady for permission, but she’s catching some Z’s.
Is that where they make the Jatco Xtronic CVT? 😛
I see this becoming a sort of death spiral for Nissan. They sell fewer cars so they reduce production capacity. Then, even if demand increases, Nissan can’t produce enough cars and they become less relevant.
I don’t know how they’re going to pull themselves out of this loop.
Time for Nissan to start building vehicles that people want with transmissions that people want too. Aside from one weirdo on this board, no one likes the CVT’s that Nissan craps out.
So, two weeks ago I had a 2024 Altima as a rental. I spent 6-8 hours per day in the car for almost a week, and I have to say that the CVT in the car was…awful. It was certainly better improved compared to older Nissans, especially the early 2010s models saddled to the V6s, but that is like saying having a foot amputated is better than the whole leg. Conversely, I hardly even notice the Toyota and Honda CVTs when I get one of those as a rental, so there is precedent that CVTs can be done well.
I think it’s the layout. Nissan puts really tiny rollers on their CVTs compared to everyone else, which means there’s less surface area for the belt to grip onto. Means they can fit it in much smaller spaces, but man does it slip.
I remember once getting a Rogue when we needed a rental. It sounded like a cow. First car I ever had with a loud pedal. If you wanted quiet moos, you didn’t push on the pedal. You wanted a loud MOO! like a cow needing to be milked, you pushed hard on the pedal. Actual acceleration seemed to be completely unrelated to the volume of the cow, sometimes it seemed like when you let off the gas, the transmission would shift ratios and speed you up.
I have avoided any Nissan product since.
I wonder how many people judge CVTs by the ubiquitous and infamous Jatco. Personally, I prefer driving CVTs from some other manufacturers over 8+ speed automatics, but Nissans are horrible.
I agree. Subaru CVTs are very good – far better than many geared automatics that I’ve driven.
The Subaru, Honda, and Toyota CVTs are way better than those old 4-autos they used to stuff in everything. At least with the CVT you get 2.2k revs at 80 mph instead of 4.5k.
Same thing at my job, we have a lot of capacity but the volumes are not there.I dont see the next years forecast going up, cars are getting more expensive and people will hold to them for longer. I hope people realize is cheaper to fix something that just replace the whole car.