Kallenius’s shaky assessment lends credence to the business talks COMPAS is babbling as Mercedes and Infiniti pivot their US vehicles toward electric cars.
Forecasting corporations LMC Automotive and AutoForecast anticipate that production at the Mexico plant will end in the middle of the decade.
“The outlook for the underutilized COMPAS plant is bleak with no product assigned beyond 2026,” AutoForecast Solutions vice president Sam Fiorani told Automotive News.
Last year, the production plant assembled 108,681 cars, well below half its capacity of 230,000, according to AutoForecast. Even at its production peak in 2020, the production facility achieved less than 50% of installed capacity.
LMC’s president of global forecasts, Jeff Schuster, said the low output from the Mexico plant is not large enough to help regional manufacturing. “It defeats the purpose of the joint venture,” Schuster said last year.
Some of the compact models built at the plant have had trouble finding traction in a market that favors large cars.
US sales of the Infiniti QX50 fell 42 percent last year, exacerbating the multi-model year sales slump.
Mercedes withdrew production of the COMPAS A-Class subcompact sedan two years after production began and halted US sales after the 2022 model year.
Nissan lost market share when its sales dropped more than 20% in 2022, a sign that Americans no longer trust the brand.
In Mexico, Nissan is about to lose its throne after 12 consecutive years of being at the top, after the ranking of its models have undergone changes so far in 2022, following the same trend as its northern neighbor.
Since its President, the Spanish José Muñoz, left Nissan in Mexico and then Nissan in the United States, the Japanese manufacturer has a serious deficit of executives, which is leading it to have a rather cloudy future.
Source: auto news