Nissan plans to add a third production shift at its Smyrna, Tennessee plant. This could create hundreds or thousands of jobs. The company needed executives and consultants and probably several months of meetings to reach this conclusion.
The new Rogue hybrid launches soon. Nissan believes Americans want to buy it. They're betting the entire expansion on this belief. Nothing has ever gone wrong with an automaker overestimating demand for a specific model.
Smyrna currently runs two shifts. The third shift represents a 50% increase in production capacity. Nissan looked at their current output, then looked at a calculator, then decided more is better. Revolutionary.
Retail traders will see this headline and immediately start googling "Nissan stock ticker symbol." They'll find out it's not NSSN or NISSAN or ROGUE. It's actually traded in Japan. This will confuse them for approximately forty-five seconds before they buy shares of Nissan Chemical Corporation instead. Different company. Doesn't make cars. Doesn't matter.
The Rogue hybrid enters a market flooded with SUVs and crossovers from every manufacturer on earth. Nissan's strategic advantage is that theirs is also a hybrid. Nobody else thought of that. Except Toyota. And Honda. And Ford. And Hyundai. And Kia. And literally everyone.
Tennessee gets the jobs because that's where the plant is. The plant is there because Tennessee offered Nissan tax incentives decades ago. The state paid Nissan to build cars there. Now Nissan might hire more people to build more cars there. Everyone will call this economic development and pretend the original deal wasn't corporate welfare.
The Smyrna plant already builds the Rogue, Pathfinder, and Infiniti QX60. Adding hybrid Rogues to the line required enough investment to justify hiring thousands of workers. Nissan spent millions on equipment so they could spend millions on labor so they could maybe make millions on hybrids that forty-seven people will actually buy.
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