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Nissan Motor Co.'s Smyrna, TN, plant recently hosted a group of Assembly South attendees before the third annual show began in Nashville. Sixty participants toured the 42-year-old facility with more than 6-million-square-feet of production space, including a body shop, a paint shop, a final assembly line and a two-mile-long test track.

Around the same time as the tour, mid-April, the plant was in the news due to the threat of tariffs. As Austin Weber writes in his article for Assembly Magazine, "Because it is particularly vulnerable to the effects of a prolonged trade war, the automaker announced that it would reverse course on a recent decision to cut back on U.S. manufacturing activity. That plan originally called for a reduction at Smyrna from two shifts a day to only one.

"Instead, Nissan revealed plans to shift assembly activity from facilities in Japan and Mexico to 'max out' production at the underutilized Smyrna plant, which has a capacity to produce 640,000 vehicles annually."

The automaker generated 30 percent of its revenue in the United States in 2024, selling 924,000 vehicles in the States, and in what was described as "a dramatic shift," plans to produce at least 80 percent of its vehicles in America, with "the Smyrna plant playing a key role."

Commitment to Quality and Innovation

In February 1981, when ground was broken on the Smyrna plant, "lean manufacturing practices were still a novelty in the United States." Additionally, over the years, Nissan has spent tens of millions keeping the plant up on the latest innovations and technology, including training employees and adopting the latest robotic techniques and investing heavily in automation with 36 miles of conveyors, a host of automated guided vehicles and smart carts, as well as "an army of 1,500 six-axis robots in the body shop perform[ing] 95 percent of all welding tasks."

During the Assembly Show guided tour, which was partly conducted by tram, the "tram slowed down and proudly pointed out the collaborative robots in use at the window installation workstation."

"Nissan claims that it has deployed more cobots on the Rogue assembly line than it has with any other previous model launch. The technology enables humans and machines to work in close proximity. Cobots ensure that repetitive tasks are done the same way every time, while reducing ergonomic risks and improving safety. This frees up operators to focus on value-added assembly and enables them to produce even higher quality vehicles."

In September 2020, in the midst of Covid pandemic, Smyrna engineers used virtual reality tools to ensure a smooth ramp up and to troubleshoot issues before moving to the production floor.

"The technology not only helped to identify manufacturability concerns before the first steel was cut for production tools, but also shaped the design of process equipment through early, virtual feedback from production technicians, helping to prevent production delays."

As Weber writes, "Those efforts paid off when Nissan Smyrna was honored for the quality of its products in 2021. It received the coveted Gold Plant Quality Award from J.D. Power. And, that same year, the Murano assembly line ranked first in quality performance among North American manufacturers."

In 2024, the plant won the inaugural "Coolest Thing Made in Tennessee" competition sponsored by the Tennessee Manufacturers Association and celebrated its 15 millionth vehicle.

Read Austin's full article profiling Nissan's Smyrna plant.