Nissans $1B EV plant in US

[Dr Mordrid]

This and Nikkei's news site are the main stories others are linking to, but there is a much longer one in the Automotive News website (subscription) that makes it to be a sure thing....

Bloomberg....

Nissan Plans $1 Billion Electric Car Plant in U.S., Nikkei Says

By Yuki Hagiwara and Alan Ohnsman

June 20 (Bloomberg) -- Nissan Motor Co. and NEC Corp. may invest as much as $1 billion in a U.S. electric car plant, to tap government loans for environmentally friendly vehicles, Nikkei English News reported.

The Japanese automaker will tie up with NEC to produce lithium-ion batteries at the factory in Smyrna, Tennessee, Nikkei said, without giving any source for the information. Annual production capacity at the site may reach as many as 100,000 vehicles by 2012, the report said.

Nissan has applied for a loan under the U.S. government program to support fuel-efficient cars, said Fred Standish, a spokesman at the automaker’s U.S. headquarters in Franklin, Tennessee. He declined to comment further on the Nikkei report. Sadayuki Hamaguchi, a spokesman at Nissan’s Tokyo headquarters, declined to comment on the report.

[Kruzin]

Just like all other Japanese assembly plants in the States (Toyota, Subaru, etc) that like to pretend their cars are 'American Made', when they are just 'American Assembled'...
While it will employ some US citizens, the parts for assembly will come from Japan. Any profits made will go to Japanese owners. We'll get squat from it in the end, cept for a few jobs.

Japan, China and Korea will be employing us, like we employed them 20 years ago.

It's going the wrong way for us.

But wait...Obama, the savior, will fix it all....
pfffft.

[Dr Mordrid]

Check your facts - things, they are a changin'.

The Japanese are now building engines and many other major parts here, not to mention buying other parts from the same US suppliers that provide parts to GM, Ford and Chrysler. In fact these US suppliers, some 500 companies employing hundreds of thousands of workers, couldn't survive without them. These run the table from small machine shops making tools to major parts makers.

In fact the US content of the Toyota Sienna minivan is higher than that of the Ford F-150 pickup: 85 to 80 percent in Toyota's favor. The Toyota Tundra has a US content of 80 percent.

On the other hand the Ford Escape fell from 90 percent for '07 to 65 percent for 2008, while the Ford Edge dropped from 95 percent for 2007 to 70 percent for 2008.

BMW is also a strong supporter of US suppliers.

The trend is clear: US makes have increasingly foreign content while foreign makes have increasingly US content.

Where this will end up is anyone's guess, but IMO it's very possible that foreign cars, including the Japanese and Korean makers, could well end up with more US parts than the domestics.