Nissan

It's complicated, and honesty matters here. Nissan engines and bodies are generally solid, and recent models score around the industry average in dependability surveys. The problem is the CVT (continuously variable transmission), which dragged Nissan's reputation down hard between roughly 2012 and 2018 with widespread failures on the Altima, Sentra, Rogue, and Pathfinder. Buy a well-maintained 2020-onward Nissan and reliability is decent. Buy a mid-2010s CVT car without service records and you're gambling.

This is Nissan's biggest reliability liability. The CVTs, built by Jatco (a company Nissan part-owns), were pushed into millions of cars before the designs were mature. The 2013-2016 Altima, Sentra, and Rogue generated thousands of NHTSA complaints about shuddering, sudden power loss, and outright failure, often well before 100,000 miles. Nissan extended some warranties and faced class-action lawsuits. The good news: 2020-and-newer CVTs use reinforced belts and improved cooling, and they hold up far better. If you buy a used Nissan, check whether the transmission was ever replaced.

Nissan Motor Co., Ltd. is a publicly traded Japanese company, so it has no single owner. Its largest strategic shareholder is Renault, which historically held over 43% but cut its direct stake to 15% in the 2023 rebalancing of the Alliance. Renault placed the rest of its Nissan shares into a French trust. Nissan, in turn, holds a 15% stake in Renault. So Nissan is independent, but deeply entangled with Renault through cross-shareholding rather than controlled by it.

Not anymore, and arguably never fully. Renault rescued Nissan from near-bankruptcy in 1999 and for years held a controlling 43.3% voting stake while Nissan held only a non-voting 15% in Renault, an imbalance that bred deep resentment in Tokyo. In 2023 the two finally rebalanced to an equal 15% cross-shareholding with reciprocal voting rights. Renault no longer controls Nissan. The companies are partners in the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi Alliance, not parent and subsidiary.

Yes. Nissan Motor Co., Ltd. is Japanese, founded in 1933 and headquartered in Yokohama, Kanagawa Prefecture. Its roots trace back even further to the DAT car of 1914. Despite its close partnership with the French automaker Renault and a global manufacturing footprint, Nissan remains a Japanese company at its core, with much of its engineering and corporate leadership still based in Japan.

All over the world. Nissan's headquarters and several plants are in Japan, but it builds cars in the United States (Smyrna, Tennessee and Canton, Mississippi), the United Kingdom (Sunderland, which produces the Qashqai and Leaf for Europe), Mexico, China, Spain, and elsewhere. The Rogue, Altima, Frontier, Pathfinder, and Murano are among the models assembled in the U.S. Where your specific Nissan was built depends on the model and the market it was sold in.

Nissan Motor Co., Ltd. was established in 1933 in Yokohama, Japan, with the name formally adopted in 1934. It grew out of the earlier DAT Motorcar company, whose first vehicle, the DAT, dated to 1914 (the name Datsun, long used by Nissan, literally means "son of DAT"). Industrialist Yoshisuke Aikawa folded the automobile business into his Nihon Sangyo holding company, and "Nissan" is a contraction of that name.

Carlos Ghosn was the powerful chairman who led the Renault-Nissan Alliance for two decades and was once celebrated for saving Nissan. In November 2018 Tokyo prosecutors arrested him on allegations of underreporting roughly $44 million of his compensation and misusing company assets. Nissan and Mitsubishi removed him from their boards. Then, in December 2019, while out on bail and awaiting trial, Ghosn made a spectacular escape, smuggled out of Japan reportedly hidden in a large equipment case on a private jet, fleeing to Lebanon, which has no extradition treaty with Japan. He remains there, a fugitive, and the affair badly destabilized Nissan's leadership for years.

Yes, seriously so. For the fiscal year ending in early 2025 Nissan reported a net loss of more than $4.5 billion. In 2025 it launched a brutal turnaround plan called Re-Nissan, announcing roughly 20,000 job cuts globally by 2027, factory closures, reduced shifts at its U.S. plants, and major cost reductions. The collapse of merger talks with Honda in early 2025 left it without an obvious rescue partner. Nissan is fighting for its independence and, by some accounts, its survival as a standalone automaker.

No. Nissan and Honda opened formal merger talks in late 2024 that would have created the world's third-largest automaker, but the negotiations collapsed in February 2025. Reporting indicated Nissan balked at terms that would have effectively made it the junior partner, a subsidiary of Honda. The failure was a major blow: Nissan's CEO Makoto Uchida stepped down shortly after, and the company was forced to pursue a standalone restructuring instead.

Effectively, yes, and it's a genuine claim to fame. Launched in 2010, the Nissan Leaf was the first mass-produced, affordable electric car sold to ordinary consumers worldwide, years before Tesla reached volume. For a long stretch it was the best-selling EV on the planet. Its main weakness was an air-cooled battery that degraded faster in hot climates, but the Leaf earned Nissan a real pioneering role in electrification, one its later EV efforts struggled to build on.

The Ariya is Nissan's modern electric crossover, a well-regarded, comfortable EV that finally moved the brand beyond the aging Leaf. The car itself reviews reasonably well. The trouble has been commercial: production delays, pricing pressure, and weak sales, with Ariya volumes collapsing in some markets in early 2026. It's a competent vehicle that arrived into a brutally competitive EV market without the momentum Nissan needed, symptomatic of the brand's broader struggles.

Globally and in the U.S., the Rogue (sold as the X-Trail in many markets) is Nissan's volume champion, consistently among the best-selling compact SUVs in America. The Sentra and Altima sedans are perennial top sellers, the Qashqai dominates in Europe, and the Frontier and Pathfinder round out the lineup. On the enthusiast side, the GT-R and the Z sports car carry the brand's performance heritage, and the Leaf and Ariya represent its EV efforts.

The GT-R is Nissan's flagship supercar and one of the most revered performance cars of the modern era, nicknamed "Godzilla." The R35 generation, launched in 2007, delivered genuine supercar performance at a fraction of European prices and became a cult icon through tuner culture, the Gran Turismo video games, and street-racing lore. Its lineage stretches back to the Skyline GT-R of the 1960s. It is the halo product that reminds everyone Nissan can still build something extraordinary.

The CVT era is the danger zone. For the Altima, steer clear of roughly 2013-2017 unless the transmission has documented service or replacement. The 2013-2016 Sentra and the 2012-2016 Rogue carry the same CVT risk. The 2004-2010 Pathfinder and Titan had their own issues, and early Leafs (pre-2015) suffer notable battery degradation in hot climates. As a rule, 2020-onward Nissans with their revised CVTs are far safer used buys.

Several problems compounded at once. The Ghosn scandal in 2018-2019 gutted leadership and froze decision-making. The CVT reliability crisis damaged the brand's reputation. An aging lineup left Nissan slow to refresh key models and slow on hybrids, where rivals like Toyota dominate. Its EV momentum from the Leaf was never fully capitalized on. Then the failed Honda merger in 2025 removed a potential lifeline, forcing deep job cuts and factory closures. Nissan is essentially paying for a lost decade.