Nissan hands its Namie mobility trial to the town as public transport

Nissan has wrapped up the Namie Smart Mobility field test programme in Fukushima Prefecture, five and a half years after work began. From 1 October, Namie Town takes over the on-demand service and runs it as regular public transport. It is a rare example of a carmaker’s mobility pilot surviving the pilot stage and becoming part of a community’s everyday infrastructure.

Nissan has announced the completion of its Namie Smart Mobility field test programme, the on-demand transport service it has been developing and testing in Namie Town, Fukushima Prefecture, since fiscal year 2020. Rather than shutting the project down, the carmaker is handing it over: from 1 October, Namie Town itself will run the service as public transport.

From partnership agreement to working service

The project grew out of the Hamadori Region Mobility Partnership Agreement signed in February 2021, a joint community development effort between Nissan, Namie Town, Futaba Town and Minamisoma. Nissan says the work was intended both to support regional recovery after the Great East Japan Earthquake and to tackle everyday local transport problems.

Over the years since, according to the company, the service was reshaped repeatedly in response to how residents actually used it. Among the changes Nissan lists are interfaces redesigned around customer feedback, a ‘SumaMobi Kids’ programme aimed at children’s transport needs, mini digital bus stops intended to make the network easier to reach, and a vehicle dispatch system built around QR codes.

Why the handover matters

Corporate mobility pilots are common; ones that outlive the trial period are not. Most field tests of this kind end when the funding or the news cycle does, leaving the municipality where it started. Here the local public transportation council agreed to let the programme continue, with the field test concluding at the end of September and the municipal service starting the next day. Moplus Co., Ltd. will support day-to-day operations under a contract with Namie Town, using the systems and operational knowledge built up during the trial.

For residents, the practical change is consolidation. Namie currently runs two parallel services: an on-demand taxi available only to residents of the town, and Namie Smart Mobility, which anyone can use. The October launch merges them.

“Starting in October 2026, we will launch a new integrated version of Namie Smart Mobility that combines both these services to consolidate operational resources and improve efficiency, drawing on the knowledge and expertise accumulated by Nissan through its activities in the town,” said Masafumi Yamada, senior manager of the Planning and Finance Division of Namie Town. “We will keep building reliable and eco-friendly public transit to support our rebuilding goals: creating a community where people want to live and relocate.”

What Nissan takes away from it

Nissan frames the project as part of a wider ambition to build mobility services that function as transport infrastructure for local communities rather than as standalone products. The company says it plans to keep running cross-sector field test programmes aimed at specific regional needs, and to use what it has learned in Namie to help similar locally tailored services get off the ground elsewhere.

That is a different kind of pitch from the usual carmaker mobility announcement, which tends to centre on autonomous hardware or app ecosystems. The Namie result is smaller and more prosaic — a rural town with an ageing transport problem now has a service it can run itself — but it is also one of the few that has reached the finish line.

The integrated Namie Smart Mobility service begins operating on 1 October 2026.

Source: global.nissannews.com