Nissan employees work on the main line of the four-cylinder engine line at the Nissan plant in Decherd, Tenn., on Thursday. The plant produces engines for the Japanese automaker, and is now making four-cylinder engines for Mercedes.
DECHERD, Tenn. — It’s easy to get lost in Nissan’s Tennessee powertrain plant.
The Japanese automaker began building engines here in 1997 with just a few hundred thousand square feet of covered space in this small Franklin County town.
It’s now the home of the largest forging press in Tennessee, and is set to become the first site in North America to produce Mercedes-Benz engines, starting in 2014.
The enormous building now contains more than 1.2 million square feet of machines that heat, grind, cut, cast and forge metal, pounding steel and aluminum into 580,000 auto engines per year.
Conveyer belts stretch to the indoor horizon in the endless warren of humming electronics that will produce more than 100 million horsepower for consumer cars and trucks by Christmas.