Every brand within the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi – Jalopnik alliance

The brainchild of automotive executive Carlos Ghosn – perhaps better known for his guitar case escape from Japan – the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi Alliance began life in 1999 when French automaker Renault, led by Ghosn, helped save the Japanese company Nissan. Of course, car mergers weren’t all that rare in the 1990s. For example, Ford bought brands such as Jaguar and Volvo, Volkswagen bought Rolls-Royce and Bentley, and Daimler and Chrysler experienced their infamous merger of equals in this decade.

But what made the Alliance different was that it was an alliance and not a merger or acquisition; Renault and Nissan continued to operate as separate companies, with each having ownership shares in the other. This was somewhat complicated by the fact that France in turn had – and still has – a significant ownership stake in Renault. A “joint management structure” for the Alliance was also established in 2021.

In any case, Nissan would acquire a controlling stake in Mitsubishi Motors in 2016, allowing the latter company to join the Alliance as well, and the result was one of the world’s best-selling car groups that year, supported by some 10 million deliveries. Through September 2025, the Alliance remained fourth globally in sales, behind only Toyota Group, Volkswagen Group and Hyundai-Kia, according to data compiled by Focus2Move. Helping things are the combined sales of eight brands: Renault, Dacia, Alpine and Mobilize of the Renault Group; Nissan and its luxury division, Infiniti; and Mitsubishi.

Founded in 1870 as a shipping company, Mitsubishi takes its name from the Japanese words behind the three-diamond emblem; ‘mitsu’ is Japanese for three, and ‘bishi’ here refers to water chestnuts – reflecting a sort of Japanese nickname for the diamond shape. The brand itself is derived from the family crests of the company’s founder, Yataro Iwasaki, and his first employer.

As an automaker, Mitsubishi was responsible for major Japanese firsts, including what some say was the country’s first mass-produced car: the 1917 Model A, with a production run of 22 cars. The first Mitsubishi sold in America was the 1971 Dodge Colt, while the brand launched in 1982 with the Mitsubishi Cordia, Starion and Tredia. It is also worth noting that the Mitsubishi Galant GS and 3000GT VR-4 were mentioned Motor trend’s Import Cars of the Year for 1989 and 1991 respectively.

More recently – and perhaps building on previous successes with the rally-inspired Lancer Evolution and the world’s first modern mass-production EV, the MiEV – Mitsubishi has carved out a nice niche with the Outlander PHEV, an affordable plug-in hybrid that shared Green Car Journal’s 2026 Family Green Car of the Year Award with the regular Outlander. The Outlander PHEV is also helping another alliance member with an old-school rebadge for the 2026 Nissan Rogue.

With all apologies to the aforementioned Mitsubishi Model A, many other experts point to the 1937 Datsun Type 15 as Japan’s first mass-produced car – as thousands were built on a modern assembly line while the 22 1917 Mitsubishis were built by hand. To get to Nissan, we actually have to go back and forward a bit in time from the late 1930s. The car manufacturer currently known as Nissan has roots in the Kwaishinsha Motor Car Works, which was founded in Japan in 1911. The company’s first car was the DAT Model 41, and after a variety of ownership and name changes, Nissan – shortened from Nihon Sangyo Co., which had become the sole investor in the company at the time – first appeared in 1934.

That said, many readers may remember that Nissan relied on the Datsun brand for its American products until the 1980s, occasionally turning out an icon like the 240Z sports car. Nissan also revived Datsun as a low-cost global brand that sold cars from 2014 to 2022.

The years since have not been kind to Nissan either. The automaker has gone from battling Toyota for the title of the country’s best-selling car – and winning just a few months ago – to fully recognizing that Carlos Ghosn’s legacy is dead as its Japanese headquarters are sold. Anyway, the Nissan Xterra is finally coming back, so a Nissan comeback wouldn’t be out of the question.

To be clear, the “bubble” of Japan’s bubble era of the late 1980s was financial in nature and burst with a bang, leading to years of economic difficulties. But for a while there it inspired an impressive expansion of Japan’s car industry, with each of the country’s Big Three launching their own dedicated luxury divisions. Honda debuted with Acura in 1986, Toyota followed with Lexus in 1989 and Nissan introduced Infiniti in 1989 with the Q45 sedan and M30 sports coupe.

During its early years, Infiniti developed a modest reputation as a credible alternative to some German premium brands, thanks to the G35 – Motor trend’s Car of the Year in 2003 – and the contemporary FX that we said was the perfect performance SUV. However, Infiniti’s fortunes have in many ways followed Nissan’s, and that has meant that Nissan’s current financial troubles have left Infiniti a shadow of its former self.

Take a look at the retail website today and you’ll see the 2024 Q5, the QX50 and the QX55 which will end production after 2025 (although they’re selling so slowly that dealers may not notice) and a few 2026 models, the QX60 and QX80. The good news? The latter body-on-frame SUV will get a twin-turbo V6 and a major technical boost for 2025.

Alliance mainstay Renault has a history of selling cars – and Le Cars – in the US, and had an ownership stake in AMC from 1979 to 1987. That means Renault is also on our list of every company that owns Jeep. But even as Renault partners with a Chinese automaker to build cars in Brazil, Renault remains close to its European roots.

Louis Renault built and took orders for his first car in 1898, and together with his brothers Marcel and Fernand, he founded the Renault company in Paris in 1899. Originally aimed at upper-class performance enthusiasts, it began to attract a wider audience when the Renault AG1 became a common choice for Parisian taxi drivers from 1905 onwards. Many were then forced into military service in World War I to help transport soldiers to the Battle of the Marne and defeat the Nazis.

Looking into the 21st century, Renault was the fifth best-selling brand in Europe last year, and remains in the same spot through October this year. The Renault Clio provided much of that momentum, as it was No. 2 on the 2024 European sales rankings; Renault is now launching the sixth-generation model and will be hoping for the Clio’s third title as European Car of the Year, having previously won in 1991 and 2006.

In addition to its namesake brand, the Renault Group owns three other companies that have had even less impact on American shores – but not always for lack of trying. The Group’s Alpine sports car brand, founded as an independent automaker by friend Renault Jean Rédélé in 1955 and then bought by Renault in 1973, planned to bring its now all-electric offering to America by 2027. Unfortunately, Trump’s tariffs have made a mess of those plans, meaning we probably won’t get the A290 hot hatch anytime soon.

The Group’s budget brand, Dacia, was the brainchild of Nicolae Ceausescu, Romania’s longtime dictator, who, before he was overthrown and executed in 1989, had decided that Romanians needed their own car brand to provide cheap, cheerful transportation for ordinary people – even if that started with the production of rebadged Renaults. Affordability became a tradition for Dacia that continued even after Renault took a majority stake in the company in 1999. Today, the budget Sandero has topped the European monthly sales charts five times so far this year, meaning it’s right on target as the best-selling car across Europe for the second year in a row.

Finally, the Renault Group has a brand that – even though it sells cars – was actually created to reduce personal car ownership. That brand is called Mobilize and will, in theory, create an entire ecosystem of products and services aimed at getting people to give up their own cars in favor of on-demand transportation with shared vehicles – like the city-sized Mobilize Duo EV. You can expect to see Mobilize in the US around the time, as the French would say, “quand les poules auront des dents” – when chickens have teeth.