Nissan Technical Center, the linchpin of Nissan monozukuri around the world, is celebrating its 30th year.
Located in Atsugi, NTC has been the center of Nissan’s design, development and engineering excellence since the early 1980s, its establishment coinciding with the rise of Japanese automakers to global prominence.
Building on an original 50 billion yen investment, the number of employees has almost tripled to 9,500 in three decades with on-site additions at NTC, including a 42,000 square meter global design complex in 2006. A year later, Nissan added state-of-the-art advanced technology and engineering centers.
NTC has played a crucial role in the development of every new Nissan or Infiniti model from the debut of the March in 1982 through to breakthrough vehicles, including the revived Fairlady Z, the GT-R and LEAF EV.
Nobuo Okubo, former Nissan executive vice president for technology and engineering development, recalls NTC’s progress.
"At the time when NTC was built, new technologies that used computers for things like three-dimensional data processing and digital simulation had progressed rapidly. During the construction, we could bring in and adopt these latest technologies," Okubo said in an interview with the Nissan Global Media Center. "I feel that's something that dramatically changed the way we approached vehicle development."
NTC is also vital to extending a culture of engineering excellence across the globe as Nissan has evolved from being a renowned exporter of cars to become an exporter of automotive know-how to employees in Asia, Europe and the Americas.
With Nissan’s Power 88 midterm business plan promising a new model roughly every six weeks until 2016, the role of NTC’s workforce remains as vital as ever for the creation of new, ground-breaking vehicles.
"I think that automakers in Japan and Germany are the only ones with such wide variety of technologies," says former EVP Okubo. "In that sense, I expect NTC to be a world technology hub for all of Nissan."
Here’s to the next 30 years.
