Nissan Is Japan’s First Car Maker to Go All-American : Automobiles: Work has already begun on a mini-van that will be designed, engineered and built in the United States.
In what could represent a dramatic shift in Japanese business strategy, Japan’s auto makers are starting to develop the ability to completely design, engineer and build new cars in the United States--with little or no input from their central offices in Japan.
Nissan, Japan’s second-largest auto maker, has quietly become the first major Japanese firm to begin work on such an all-American project. Here on the outskirts of Detroit, Nissan has set up a sprawling engineering complex where 260 Japanese and American engineers and other staffers--many of them emigres from the nearby offices of the Big Three auto makers--are working side by side on the first Japanese auto to be developed in the United States.
Nissan Research and Development, the auto maker’s engineering unit, is performing the developmental work on a new mini-van that was designed by Nissan’s design studio in San Diego.
Starting in 1992, the front-wheel-drive mini-van will be assembled in a Ford factory in Avon Lake, Ohio, through a joint venture between Nissan and Ford and finally will be sold both by Nissan and by Ford’s Lincoln-Mercury division.
While Nissan and other major Japanese auto makers have had design and styling studios in California for years, the Nissan mini-van represents the first time that a Japanese product designed in California will actually be engineered and fully developed in the United States. Previously, initial clay models proposed by stylists in Southern California were shipped back to Japan, where Japanese engineers then turned the designs into cars ready for manufacture.
Nissan’s decision to shift engineering resources from Japan to the United States follows new policy guidelines set by the company’s top management to try to become a truly global company, rather than just a Japanese corporation that sells worldwide, according to Nissan R&D; President Takeshi Tanuma, who is now based here in Plymouth.
“Nissan wants to have one complete auto company in the United States,” Tanuma said. “Once we have a complete auto company here, then we will be insiders in the American auto industry.”
Nissan’s action also follows years of warnings by some American economists and industry observers that the Japanese would provide only unskilled factory jobs to Americans--so that they could assemble cars here and thus skirt U.S. trade sanctions--but would always keep the really good jobs for highly educated professionals back home in Tokyo.
“They only want our brute strength,” Maryann Keller, the well-known automotive analyst with the Furman Selz Mager Dietz & Birney brokerage in New York, has complained.
To be sure, Nissan’s mini-van project has required help from Japan. For example, the van’s front-wheel-drive transmission and its V-6 engine were designed in Japan--at least in part because Nissan engineers felt that Ford’s comparable American-designed engines were outmoded.
But Tanuma still believes that the rapid pace of change in the U.S. car market is making it increasingly difficult for designers and engineers working in Japan to keep up with American tastes, without at least some engineering and design facilities in the United States.
The recent flap over the court case involving a Nissan engineer who lived undercover with an Orange County family--allegedly spying on them and their neighbors while concealing his real identity--was really an outgrowth of the new Japanese determination to “Americanize” their products.
“It is difficult for Japanese engineers to tell what is luxury in the United States, to tell what American tastes are,” Tanuma said.
“Is it possible for a Japanese to understand American tastes while sitting in Tokyo on a tatami mat? To understand what it is like to sit in a big American house, with a big American living room, while he is sitting in his . . . little Japanese apartment?”
Honda has also begun to rely more heavily on American engineers for its new cars. About 250 Honda engineers, working at the company’s massive Marysville, Ohio, manufacturing complex, are performing most of the development work on a new 1991 Honda Accord station wagon, which was largely designed by Honda’s design center in Torrance.
The Accord station wagon will be produced exclusively in the United States and then exported to the rest of the world, according to Shigeaki Kato, Honda spokesman in Detroit.
But Honda has not yet taken the leap that Nissan has--completely developing a new product in America. Kato noted that while the Accord wagon was developed here, the basic Accord sedan model was designed in Japan.
“But we’ve said that Honda would become a self-reliant company in this country,” he added, “and that means that eventually we want to design, engineer and build a car completely independent of Japan. But you don’t do that overnight. . . .
“Our (American) manufacturing in Ohio is now mature, and the research and development and engineering aspects of our American operations are growing,” Kato added. “The next step could possibly be a complete car.”
