14 Dec 06
Nissan
Nissan was founded in 1911 and soon began making cars, trucks and military vehicles. The first Datsun-branded vehicle, the 12, was launched in 1933, and the merger with the Nihon Sangyo car company in 1934 saw the creation of the Nissan Motor Company and Japan's first mass-production car factory at Yokohama.
In WWII, the Yokohama plant was dedicated to manufacturing military vehicles, and Nissan built a new factory at Yoshiwara to make the Ha-47 aircraft engine. In the aftermath of the war, the large Japanese conglomerate companies were broken up and some re-merged to form new corporations. The formation of Fuji Sangyo took in the Nakajima and Tachikawa aircraft companies, both of which had produced large numbers of fighter craft which had seen battle alongside the Mitsubishi Zero. Fuji Sangyo broke up again in 1950, but one of its divisions spawned Tama Motors, to be known as Prince from 1955.
Nissan 240Z
Prince developed a range of innovative cars including the Skyline and the Gloria, under chief engineer Ryoichi Nakagawa - an aircraft designer during the war, credited with work on the Zero, among other planes, and leading a team largely composed of former aircraft engineers. Prince was said to be the most technologically advanced Japanese car maker at the time; it was merged into Nissan in 1966, and enthusiasts' forums contend that the light weight and engine design of the original Skyline and subsequent Datsun/Nissan sports cars such as the 240Z owe a lot to the engineering teams' time in aircraft building, as do Nissan's modular production line techniques. Nissan continued to run an aerospace division, focusing increasingly on rockets and defence equipment, into the 1990s, even building a new factory in Tomioka in 1997, but when the company ran into financial difficulties in 2000 it sold this off along with other non-core assets.
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