According to foreign media reports, Nissan announced on February 17th that it would invest $500m to renovate its assembly plant in Canton (Canton), Mississippi, where it will produce two new electric vehicles in the future. A senior company executive also said they were also looking for sites to build new battery factories in the United States.
Nissan plans to start producing Nissan-branded and Infiniti-branded electric cars at its Mississippi plant in 2025. The company also said it aims to make electric vehicles account for 40 per cent of its total US sales by 2030. Nissan has already announced that it will invest $18 billion to expand its fleet of electric vehicles worldwide by 2030, and it has announced that it will launch 23 electric vehicles worldwide by 2030, 15 of which are pure electric vehicles.
Nissan Canton has two production lines, one for light trucks (including the Nissan Frontier), and the other for assembling the Altima midsize sedan). Nissan will revamp its Altima production line to make both internal combustion engine and electric cars, according to Ashwani Gupta, Nissan's chief operating officer. Other space in the Canton plant will be used to produce battery packs and run other businesses. Nissan said it would retrain 2000 workers as part of the new investment, which employs 5000 people. "We will invest a lot of time and money in improving the skills of our workers," Gupta said. "
Nissan said the investment in the Mississippi plant was "one of several investments" it made over the next five years to boost US electric vehicle production. Gupta revealed that Nissan's Mexican plant will also receive new investment related to electric vehicles, saying: "it is clear that Mexico will also be involved." "We are determining the location and timing of building a battery plant in the United States," Gupta said in an interview.
