Prince Motor Company

Prince Motors, Ltd.^[1]

Native name	プリンス自動車工業株式会社
Romanized name	Prince Jidōsha Kōgyō Kabushiki-gaisha
Company type	Public
Industry	Automotive industry Aerospace industry[2] Power loom[2]
Founded	June 30, 1947; 77 years ago (1947-06-30) (Foundation of the Tokyo Electric Car Company)[3]
Defunct	August 1, 1966 (1966-08-01)
Fate	Merged into Nissan
Successor	Nissan
Headquarters	Suginami, Tokyo , Japan
Key people	Shojiro Ishibashi Ryoichi Nakagawa Jiro Tanaka Shinichiro Sakurai
Products	Automobile Pencil Rocket (collaboration with Hideo Itokawa and Tokyo University) Power loom
Subsidiaries	Rhythm Friend Manufacturing (current THK Rhythm)

The Prince Motor Company (Japanese: プリンス自動車工業株式会社) was an automobile marque from Japan which eventually merged into Nissan in 1966. It began as the Tachikawa Aircraft Company, a manufacturer of various airplanes for the Japanese Army in World War II, e.g., the Ki-36, Ki-55 and Ki-74. Tachikawa Aircraft Company was dissolved after the war and the company took the name Fuji Precision Industries. It diversified into automobiles, producing an electric car, the Tama, in 1946, named for the region the company originated in, Tama, using the Ohta series PC/PD platform. The company changed its name to Prince in 1952 to honor Akihito's formal investiture as Crown Prince of the nation. In 1954 they changed their name back to Fuji Precision Industries, and in 1961 changed the name back again to Prince Motor Company. In 1966, they became part of Nissan, while the Prince organization remained in existence inside Nissan, as Nissan Prince Store in Japan until Nissan consolidated the Prince dealership network into "Nissan Blue Stage" in 1999.