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Nissan is a Japanese carmaker that designs, builds, and sells vehicles worldwide, from cheap compact cars to electric models and pickup trucks.
Nissan is one of the world's big carmakers, selling tens of millions of vehicles over its history under brands like Nissan, Infiniti, and Datsun. Most people meet Nissan through its everyday cars — the Sentra, Altima, Rogue, and the Leaf, one of the first mass-market electric cars. It also sells pickup trucks like the Frontier and Titan, and through Infiniti it sells luxury cars. The company builds and sells vehicles around the world, with big markets in the United States, China, Japan, and Europe.
Nissan makes money the way most carmakers do: it builds cars and sells them to dealers and distributors, who sell them to you. The dealer pays Nissan for the car, and Nissan also earns money from financing, parts, and service. The tricky part of the car business is that it is brutally competitive and capital-hungry — you must spend billions on factories, tooling, and engineering before you sell a single car, and profits swing wildly with demand and currency moves. Nissan has had a rough stretch: after years of turmoil following the 2018 arrest of its former chairman Carlos Ghosn, the company has been cutting costs, shrinking its lineup, and trying to reset its business, especially in China where sales have fallen sharply. Nissan's most important partnership is with Renault, the French automaker. For two decades the two companies were tied together in a complicated alliance, sharing parts and factories to save money. That alliance was shaken up in 2023 when Renault trimmed its stake in Nissan and the two agreed to a more balanced relationship. Nissan also has a long history in electric cars — the Leaf was the first mass-market EV when it launched in 2010 — and it is now investing in new EVs and solid-state battery technology to stay relevant as rivals like Tesla and BYD surge ahead.
The car business is a tough way to make a living, and Nissan shows why. You need scale to spread out the enormous fixed costs of factories and development, and when sales slip, profits can vanish fast. Nissan has been trying to fix its problems by cutting production capacity, simplifying its lineup, and leaning on partners for new technology. It is a company with real engineering history and global reach, but it is also a company fighting to prove it can compete profitably in a world moving quickly toward electric and Chinese-made cars.
Saved answer · last researched 6 Nov 2026