Japanese initiative to persuade Tesla to join Nissan
According to a report in the Financial Times, an advisory group led by former Tesla board member Hiro Mizuno wants to convince Elon Musk to join the company. The group believes that Tesla could be interested in taking over Nissan’s plants in the US. Former Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga also supports the plan.
The plans are quite concrete. The Japanese group is planning an investor consortium for Nissan, with Tesla being the largest financial backer. A Tesla investment could prevent Nissan from being completely swallowed up by Foxconn – other activist and private equity groups are also said to be “circling,” the report states. The Japanese group fears the carmaker “could fall into potentially hostile foreign hands” if the struggling company were to focus strictly on returns. Tesla taking over US plants would be the lesser of two evils.
According to the FT, several Nissan board members know about the initiative. The consortium of investors led by Tesla is supposed to leave room for a minority investment by Foxconn. Only the majority takeover by the latter would be prevented – now that the merger with Honda, which had been sought in the meantime, is officially off the table. Nissan is looking for new partners and did not comment on the information about the Japanese initiative when asked by the FT.
Nissan has two assembly plants in Tennessee and Mississippi with a total capacity of around one million vehicles per year – the production of electric cars is planned. However, only 525,000 vehicles were built there last year, meaning the factories only operate at around half capacity. Nissan has thus already decided to reduce the number of shifts at both plants. Tesla already has electric car plants in California and Texas and builds all vehicles sold in the US there. The company’s own plant for the electric Semi truck in Nevada is still under construction.
However, the Japanese initiative’s plan has a catch – or two, in fact. Although factory capacity utilisation at the plants in the US is low, the US market is crucial for Nissan in terms of sales and turnover. Nissan could thus not want to sell plants to another car manufacturer. Secondly, Tesla would have to be interested in taking over the Nissan plants, which are still primarily focused on combustion engines. In its annual report for 2024, the EV maker emphasised that it would first use new production methods to increase the capacity of its existing plants to a total of around three million vehicles (from the current 2.35 million units) before investing in new production lines.
And Elon Musk also indirectly declines. With regard to the ‘unboxing’ production strategy, which is set to debut in 2026 with the Cybercab in Giga Texas, Musk writes on X: “The Tesla factory IS the product. The Cybercab production line is like nothing else in the automotive industry.” Taking over combustion plants does not fit into the programme.
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