Joining a growing list of automakers, including — as of Wednesday — the Detroit Three, Nissan has announced it will cease production in the United States.
While an automaker with falling sales and bloated inventory isn’t likely to find itself in a car-less position when production resumes, those same elements spell nothing good for a company that was already in dire straits before the pandemic hit.
Production ends on March 20th, with the automaker’s four American plants (in Tennessee and Mississippi) not expected to come back online until April 6th.
“The company is taking this action to boost containment efforts where possible around the COVID-19 coronavirus,” the company said in a statement. “Currently, there are no confirmed cases of COVID-19 coronavirus at any Nissan facility. Areas deemed business-essential will operate with enhanced safety measures.”
On Wednesday, Ford, General Motors, and Fiat Chrysler announced temporary shutdowns of all U.S. assembly plants, with Honda joining the fray nearly at the same time.
Before coronavirus became a household word (and fear), Nissan found itself on the hunt for any and all cost-saving measures — everything from vastly reduced travel budgets to worker furloughs. Revamped models appeared with fewer trims and build configurations. The manual transmission is all but dead. While the automaker’s global sales suffered greatly over the past couple of years, North America remains a chief focus for newly minted CEO Makoto Uchida.
Uchida has stated that if he can’t reverse the company’s trajectory in short order, he’ll happily accept his termination. However, coronavirus represents a wrench thrown into the gears.
Last month, Nissan unveiled an earnings report that was anything but praiseworthy, slashing its profit forecast at the same time. The automaker’s U.S. sales fell 9.9 percent in the U.S. last year, with premium division Infiniti showing the larger customer exodus (more than 21 percent).
With COVID-19, at least Nissan can say it isn’t alone in its misery.
[Image: Nissan]
The hits keep coming. We have done this to ourselves and have no one else to blame. The pain is going to be immense. We need to stop this madness. People need to go back to work. Kids need to be in school. Isolate the vulnerable. Everyone else take normal precautions. We need to demand a halt to this economic suicide.
thelaine-You really need to educate your self on Covid-19. China’s steps and what they did (of course-it’s probably not feasible in the U.S.) shows how to stop COVID-19.
And your port is the opposite of what is PROVEN to halt the spread.
Had China bothered to regulate their food supply in any meaningful way versus looking the other way, likely due to corruption this would not have happened. I hope they take a bath as companies decide to no longer put all of their supply chain eggs in that single basket.
ART
You are spot on. China has culpability here. Their direct action and IN ACTIONs have caused the problem and the high level of impact.
Evil society on many levels.
They need to pay a price for this.
The truth is the spread can’t be halted; everyone posting here and reading this comment are likely to be exposed to COVID-19 at some point over the next year.
And almost all of us will fend it off without too much difficulty or any need to visit a doctor.
I get the desire to “flatten the curve” through “social distancing,” and of course none of us want any of our family or friends to get sick. However, the reality is that it’s also not worth tanking the global economy to save Grandpa.
I also agree with those posting that China must face severe retribution for this. This wouldn’t have happened at this level had the ChiComs been forthright from the beginning (and if the WHO hadn’t fallen so easily for their party line.)
They are like any other Communist dictatorship…rotten from the inside. And spare me the “Could happen anywhere and our Government is corrupt too” talk (not you Red, but it’s coming).
Remember when tainted US Food became a Global Pandemic? Yeah, neither do I because when we have a food issue the supply is regulated to the point that they can trace it back to the freaking Farm and date of harvest typically. This is what First World nations do. Yes, a Pandemic could start in the US or Europe, but not this Pandemic.
On top of admonishing them and diversifying supply chains, The West as a whole should suspend service payments on Chinese held debt as a means to help finance the clean up of their mess.
Exactly
@C5; No need to recount statistics, instead we can just compare your comments to that of another famous capitalist named Scrooge: “If they would die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”
Sorry Arthur, but mine is a perfectly rational approach to this crisis, whereas your glib response plays further into emotion and fear. I won’t presume your motivations for doing so.
We’re all going to die; those claimed by this virus would likely have died from something in relatively short order anyway. The current hysteria is not worth bringing down the global economy; there is no rational argument otherwise.
“We’re all going to die; those claimed by this virus would likely have died from something in relatively short order anyway.”
wow, don’t cut yourself on that edge, kid.
I’m 45, kiddo. Again, mine is the rational position. I refuse to bend to those allowing emotion and fear to dictate their actions.
Not one of us is indispensable. Or immortal.
You do the same, CKN
https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-as-the-coronavirus-pandemic-takes-hold-we-are-making-decisions-without-reliable-data/
John P.A. Ioannidis is professor of medicine, of epidemiology and population health, of biomedical data science, and of statistics at Stanford University and co-director of Stanford’s Meta-Research Innovation Center.
@thelaine: You first.
“Normal precautions” don’t work for a virus that survives 3 hours in the air, and 3 days on surfaces. Please stop it.
Well, I’m still at work, so OK
Me too. So OK. I have family to feed.
Your just afraid of dying from fluid filling your lungs.
People are beginning to learn the truth, despite the hysteria.
Pew reports that 70 percent of Americans believe that the outbreak poses a major risk to the nation’s economy, while 47 percent say it is major threat to the population’s health. Just 27 percent said they believe that the new virus presents a major hazard to their own personal health and 51 percent say it’s a minor threat. Twenty-two percent even believe that the outbreak poses no risk at all to their health.
And how many Americans believe that the world is flat, that humans co-habited with dinosaurs and that vaccines cause autism?
There is no law against being ‘willfully ignorant’.
But I do agree with holding back any payments to China as reparations.
Fewer than 200 have died in the U.S. and under 9,000 worldwide.
According to the CDC, during the 2018-2019 flu season, an estimated 16.5 million people got sick and 34,000 died in the U.S. alone.
This season of COVID has barely started. Comparison to past virus outbreaks doesnt prove much.
The Corona wave has pretty much passed over China. About 3,500 deaths in a population of almost 1.4 billion. Virtually all of them in the vulnerable population. We should put all of our efforts into protecting them, and the rest of us should take the usual flu precautions, stop the fear and hysteria, and get back to work.
If we take the same steps as China, you’ll be back here within minutes bawling over how the jackbooted thugs took away your freedom.
Hint: most parts of the country haven’t even been exposed to the virus, because of extremely strict restrictions on internal movement.
China closed the barn door after the horse got out. The virus spread all over the country and the world by the time they imposed harsh restrictions.
The virus spread all over the world, but not all over the country.
And the areas where it did spread limited the impact through widespread testing, tracking, and strict limits on movement. In other words, exactly the things that you are saying are overreactions when officials here want to do them.
“People need to go back to work. ”
No it is good. We will have free medical care, free college, free food, free income and nobody will have to suffer from long commute every day. I like it.
And STOP THE TOILET PAPER HOARDING!