Nissan Oppama Plant Tour 日産自動車追浜工場

Get an up-close look at the latest in car technology during a 90-minute tour of Nissan's Oppama plant, one of the country's largest plants. Electric and e-POWER-equipped vehicles are built at this sprawling facility.

Oppama Station is about a 25-minute train ride from Yokohama Station on the Keihin Kyuko Line. Getting from Oppama Station to the plant requires a 20-minute walk.

A 5-minute video presentation kicks off the tour. You will be given a brief but interesting introduction to the plant and its activities, including its size, more than 1.7 million square meters; its number of employees, more than 3,000; and its methods of manufacturing, which use the latest technology and delivery systems to avoid wasting materials and time. It takes around 24 hours to build a car from start to finish.

The tour includes a trip to the wharf area, where cars are loaded on ships for delivery to other ports in Japan and overseas. If you are lucky, you will see the professional drivers load the cars on the ships at a pace of 100 cars an hour, parking them only 10 centimeters apart.

The visit to the assembly line is the highlight of the tour. The Oppama Plant became the first in Japan to use robots on the production line when it introduced welding robots in 1970. The robots are still an amazing sight to see as they twist and rotate with the precision and grace of an automated ballet.