Nissan to Enter Commercial Market

Nissan Motor Co. will build three light commercial trucks in the U.S., following through on a two-year-old plan to expand sales by entering the North American work-vehicle market, Bloomberg News reported.

The automaker, Japan's third largest, will build the vehicles in Canton, MS, and begin sales in 2010. The program includes partnerships with Cummins, Inc. for the engines and ZF Friedrichshafen AG for transmissions.

Joe Castelli, a former Ford Motor Co. executive, will run Nissan's new Light Commercial Vehicle division. The Tokyo-based company said it's investing an additional $118 million in the Canton plant to accommodate production of the three unnamed vehicles.

In January 2006, Nissan said it planned to form a unit to sell light commercial vehicles in the U.S. The five-year-old Canton plant has yet to use all of its capacity to make 400,000 vehicles a year. Nissan said production of two of the five models now built there, the Quest minivan and Infiniti QX56 luxury sport-utility vehicle, will end, Bloomberg said.