Summary
- Nissan’s pride and denial hindered merger talks, sources say
- Honda pushed Nissan for deeper cuts to jobs, factory capacity, sources say
- Nissan unwilling to consider factory closures, sources say
- Honda’s proposal to make Nissan a subsidiary caused tensions, sources say
- Honda realized Nissan has nothing to offer them
Sources say.
Honda is better off without them.
Personally think Nissan is better positioned for the EV future and Honda is likely to be the one that needed this more. 🤷♂️
Nissan could have been better positioned for EV but they didn’t bother actually doing anything with the Leaf for a decade.
Kinda like how they could have been a high performance brand with the GTR if they bothered to actually do any more development on it for the past decade.
The leaf was an objectively terrible Eevee that probably set the industry back a few years.
Autocorrect changed it to Eevee and I think it works.
Disagree, they are exactly the type of EV we should be building: inexpensive, enough range for around town, pretty dependable. The first couple model years had crappy range, but the later ones were fine.
What Nissan needed was to expand the EV product line. Ideas:
- make the Leaf cheaper - 150 mile range, look into cheaper chemistries; should be the cheapest EV on the road; prize prioritize reliability and cost
- make a sports car that you want to drive - this is your flagship - prioritize speed and style
- make something in between the two (fast, but also practical) - what most people will get; compete directly with Model 3
Don’t compete on range at all, that’s R&D you don’t want to deal with. Just make great cars for urban and suburban use.
They weren’t dependable is the problem. There were a lot of problems with early deterioration of the battery, supposedly from not having very good temperature control on the battery pack.
Sure, and battery deterioration is largely only a problem if you don’t have much range to begin with. They put larger batteries in after a year or two, which largely solved the problem for the intended use case: around town car.
But that’s also why I mentioned reliability and price should be the focus. They’re not going to be leading R&D on better battery range, so they might as well focus on a niche.
Range anxiety is not an illegitimate concern though. Sure I probably don’t need that capacity more than maybe once every year but what about when I do need it?
How am I supposed to be able to drive halfway across the country to see my family every Christmas if my car only has 150 miles of range and it takes 4 hours to fully recharge. That’s going to turn a 3-hour road trip into 10 hours if we have to stop and wait for it to recharge. My problem with the leaf was that it had hardly any range at all so that problem was massively exacerbated.
It’s great in a multi-car household where the other car is something with a bit more range but as you’re only vehicle you better hope that no family emergency crop up.
To be clear I would have the same issues with an ICE only had 150 miles of range but in some ways that would be better because it “recharges” faster.
Range anxiety is not an illegitimate concern though.
Hence why I focused on vehicle classes more common as a second car. We have two cars, and one never goes further than 100 miles in a given day.
That’s the niche EVs should focus on, especially while battery tech makes >400 mile range impractical. I think Nissan (or any car company) could do quite well focusing on the second car market.
Except the chevy volt is cheaper and has a longer range. Nissan has also done nothing with battery tech or chemistry. That’s all been being advanced by Samsung, toyota and panasonic. There’s nothing the leaf has to offer on a technology front, and there’s no reason to buy one today. Even a decade ago it was a poor choice for 95% of the US market.
Right, which is why I said they should’ve focused on price and reliability. They’re not going to lead on battery tech, so they should experiment with things like sodium ion batteries, which are much cheaper, have less fire risk, and they don’t need the range anyway for a commuter/around town car.
Find a niche and fill it.
Sodium ion is a dead end for ev. Heavy and not even remotely close to energy dense enough. It never will be.
Didn’t the Bolt come out 6 years after the Leaf? It should be a lot better in that case as the pace of development has been pretty rapid in EV space relative to normal ICE development
I got excited because I saw a Honda EV, a prologue. Looked it up, it’s a rebranded Chevy Blazer. Honda is absolutely fucked…
Good
More Nissan for me!
But yeah, Nissan seems to be making some nicer cars lately. Hopefully they can shake off the bad stigma gained by Goghn’s cost cutting and bad cvts. Plus, Nissan actually makes electric cars, something Honda, I don’t believe, has even attempted yet. They had a sweet deal with GM, and they dropped the partnership. Nissans got the Leaf and Aria, and there’s rumors of them using Mitsubishi’s hybrid system in the upcoming years.
They were one of the few, if only, remaining manufacturers in the US that produced a subcompact car. Yet they are getting rid of both the Versa and Altima.
I hate how everybody bloated up their fleets with crossovers and SUVs…
I hate how everybody bloated up their fleets with crossovers and SUVs…
While I generally think regulations are a net positive, the cafe regulations treating SUVs as trucks for minimum mileage is the main reason for the ever increasing vehicle size and shift to massive SUVs dominating the roads.
They should be less punishing for smaller cars and more punishing for large vehicles designed for passengers and commuting.
Exactly. The whole point was to help farmers, but it was broad enough that car manufacturers could include SUVs under the rule.
We should’ve just allowed an exemption for models sold exclusively to farmers if that was a concern. Or just, don’t do it.
There are a lot of other personal uses for vans and pickups and other heavier duty vehicles in rural areas which require more power to haul things beyond farmers. Moving large amounts of wood and cleared brush, having off road capabilities that include lots of torque, and other stuff that has nothing to do with highway driving are common outside of cities.
The exemptions should be handled in a way that discourages owning such a vehicle for personal use in an urban setting without being tied to a business. Hell, that could involve who the vehicles are being advertised/targeted to for in addition to literal vehicle types.
The problem was not changing up when it became apparent that the outcome was discouraging high mileage small cars for commuting. Overthinking the how to discourage laerger trucks misses the point that car companies leaned into large vehicles and advertised to convince the population that they needed larger vehicles. They could have been barred from advertising large vehicles.
100% agreed. There are multiple ways to solve this problem, yet we looked at none of them. A work truck shouldn’t be concerned much w/ fuel economy, since it’s a very small group of people that need them. Just like we have special farm diesel, we should have special vehicles that are only available to that demographic, and they can be stripped down versions of similar/same vehicles intended for regular consumers (who will pay a premium for the privilege).
I do worry about Nissan’s future when they seem to be about this close to operating with zero profits.
Honda has made both the “e” in 2020 and “e:Ny1” in 2023, both seem like decent BEVs in their price segment.
