The DaimlerChrysler capital tie-up (2000)

A foreign-capital rescue that ended the opposite way to Nissan’s

This decision was often spoken of alongside Nissan, which in the same years carried out a “no sanctuary” rebuild under Renault. But the two companies’ maladies were alike only on the surface. Where Nissan’s slump lay in a fixation on being Japan’s number two and in a broken expansion strategy, Mitsubishi’s malady lay in quality fraud — an absence of the spirit of lawfulness. What Daimler brought was capital and discipline, not the power to replace the very organisational culture that bred concealment. The disposition to shut out bad information survived under the alliance too, and can be seen as having erupted as the second recall cover-up.

Mitsubishi chose Daimler by elimination, after both GM and Ford had walked away — not out of conviction. President Kawazoe’s optimism, accepting a controlling 34% stake while insisting that “our managerial autonomy is preserved,” misjudged the logic of foreign capital. For a Mitsubishi Motors that had switched its main partner on a roughly fifteen-year cycle — Chrysler in 1971, Daimler in 2000, Nissan in 2016 — dependence on foreign capital was at once a means of survival and a fate of being perpetually governed by the balance of power. The ending, in which the very partner it had entrusted with its rescue abandoned it at the critical moment, engraved the heavy truth of a carmaker that cannot stand alone — the reverse side of Nissan’s tale of success.