While Toyota, according to Nikkei, plans to build three vehicle assembly plants in India, tripling its production capacity in the country to reach one million units by 2030 with a total investment approaching 2 billion dollars, its compatriot Nissan, struggling with a crisis that made 2025 a very dark year, is halting electric car production in the U.S., thus changing its plans related to the Canton, Mississippi plant which, according to 2021 announcements, was the result of a half-billion-dollar investment.
NISSAN’S ORIGINAL PLANS IN MISSISSIPPI
According to the local press at the time, in the plant that until the pandemic years mainly produced Altima, Frontier, Titan, and Titan XD, the Japanese company intended to roll out two new fully electric vehicles with the declared goal of reaching 40% electric vehicles in its total U.S. sales by 2030.
Hence the intention to use the facility with over 5,000 workers as the cradle for the electric car destined to serve the States. All this happened less than five years ago, but in such a fluid market and a geopolitical situation that suddenly became so fragmented and precarious, even a few years amount to an era.
In fact, since then everything has changed: the electric car bubble wiped out a large number of startups that proliferated right at the start of the new decade, putting even the most capitalized manufacturers to the test, and the return of Donald Trump to the White House — who is not at all fond of electric vehicles — did the rest.
PLAN B TRIGGERS
But a local plant is still important, especially in these times when the American president does not hesitate to lash out at trade partners with sudden tariffs. Hence the need for a deep makeover. Also because the plant is underutilized: in 2025 Nissan sold only 158,500 units produced on those lines that could churn out 400,000 units annually. Less than a year ago, press rumors had speculated that Nissan would produce Honda pick-ups in Mississippi.
According to Automotive News, however, the Japanese automaker, after informing its suppliers that it had scrapped plans for electric vehicle production in Canton, also communicated that it intends to make room for more traditional models that may have greater appeal among the broad U.S. public. Namely SUVs and pick-ups.
Among these, an SUV under $40,000, the Xterra, which will share the platform with other models, a possible Pathfinder successor, and a Frontier pick-up are reportedly in the works: it is reasonable to assume that, to optimize costs, the vehicles built in Mississippi will share most components. But above all, it is already noticeable how the themes of sustainability linked to electric cars have now taken a back seat.
