Toyota Might Be Nissan’s Savior Following Collapsed Merger Talks With Honda

After Nissan and Honda’s planned merger fell on its face a few months back, it seemed like all hope was lost for the Japanese automaker. Now, it would seem that Nissan’s salvation could be found in Toyota. The auto-making giant has surfaced as a backup partner for the struggling company.

After negotiations between Nissan and Honda fell apart in February of this year, an executive from the world’s largest automaker apparently reached out to Nissan to offer support, according to Automotive News. There’s a lot of mystery surrounding what the two automakers might do together. Neither have publicly disclosed discussions on partnering or cooperation. Spokespeople for both companies didn’t comment.

If Toyota takes a small stake in Nissan, it wouldn’t exactly be unprecedented. It has a bit of a habit of taking a minority position in other Japanese automakers to build alliances. It has small stakes in Subaru, Mazda, Suzuki and Isuzu. It also has a 50.1% stake in truck-maker Hino and it wholly owns Japanese minicar builder Daihatsu as a subsidiary.

At the end of 2024, we reported that Nissan and Honda announced they were going to explore a merger, but as quickly as talks started, they ended. Discussions between the two companies were marred by disagreements over managerial control. Nissan wanted to play a bigger part in decision-making than Honda was comfortable with. I suppose that is fair if you consider the fact that the decisions Nissan’s management made are what landed it in this mess in the first place.

By the middle of February, negotiations were all but dead. Following that, there was a lot of speculation as to whether Nissan could actually survive on its own, AutoNews reports. The company also ditched then-CEO Makoto Uchida and handed the reins to Ivan Espinosa on April 1.

He’s been very busy since then, unveiling an aggressive turnaround plan for Nissan that doubles the number of job cuts to over 20,000 workers and shuts seven of the company’s 17 assembly plants around the world. The moves are drastic and tough to see, but it seems they may be necessary if Nissan wants to stay alive. He’s also leaning on partners Mitsubishi and Renault for new models.

Espinosa told reporters he wasn’t going to rush to find a new partnership and that the top priority was to revive Nissan from within, according to Automotive News. That’s one tall order, and probably why the company is undergoing a strategic review for potential partnerships.

Here’s what Espinosa said. From AutoNews:

“This is a very open review that we’re doing, and we are evaluating potential partners that will bring additional corporate value to Nissan,” Espinosa said, adding that ideal partners would bring synergies in Nissan’s top markets, the U.S. and Japan, as well as in advanced technologies.

He added: “The most important thing is to have the right partner.”

[…]

“We have many potential candidates that we can imagine working on or working with, and there are many ways that we can imagine partnering with somebody,” Espinosa said. “You could do integration, you could do capital investments, you could do spin off for certain business units.”

Espinosa added that he envisions many partnership possibilities — including another possible go-around with Honda, but I doubt that’s going to happen. He mentioned integration, capital investments or business unit spinoffs as possible scenarios.