Honda and Nissan reported in merger talks

In reply to z31maniac :

Toyota's CEO said that he wanted Toyota to be a vehicular department store.

I thought, yeah, you have house brand vehicles as well as things from other manufacturers!

In reply to Pete. (l33t FS) :

I'm curious to see what the next Celica will look like if they actually do it. 

But I was also looking forward to a new 510, but that never happened either. 

So....

Nissan has been phoning it in for 20 years, (More?)

And Honda is gonna come in and lead the little brother out of the woods, to the glory of everyone...(?)

This seems like a cringey story to watch, (Like several simultaneous slow motion train wrecks)

And I still can't turn away...

Rog

Kinda late to this party, but if I look into my memory banks, Datsun died the exact same day they decided to become Nissan. Decomposition  in the form of Nissan, has taken a bit longer.  Looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooonnnnnnnnnngggggggggg   slow death. 

Kinda like that once sucessfull social media company that rebranded as another stupid imaged brand. WTF with people doing that?

In reply to NOHOME :

They didn't become Nissan, they always were Nissan. They decided to use Datsun for exports, and changed it to the parent company (Nissan) once they had (what they assumed) enough market share. A horrible decision, but there was some thought behind it. It wasn't some imagined or made up brand. 
 

Valve covers of Datsun 2000 are stamped Nissan. 

NOHOME said:

Kinda late to this party, but if I look into my memory banks, Datsun died the exact same day they decided to become Nissan. 

When weren't they Nissan?  At least, open the hood of a Datsun 240Z and the valve cover says Nissan.

The whole thing with them is confusing.  Datson, Datsun, Nissan buying Prince and there apparently bring an inter-company rivalry for a few more decades, leading to them engineering multiple cars for the same market segment...

In that Toyota is repackaging other manufacturer's vehicles. The GR86 is a BRZ with different suspension valving, front bumper, and colors available. The only Toyota part on the twins is the fuel injection set up.

Not to get too far off track for this thread, but what about the transmission, the rear differential, and the direct injection? Which Subaru model were these from? AFAIK, these parts were all developed by Toyota, and they got their hands pretty well into the cylinder heads as well.

I frequently hear this sentiment parroted on the internet, and it ignores the fact that the original was a joint effort spearheaded and driven by Toyota, and the current generation is a development of the original. It wasn't an existing Subaru model that Toyota suddenly co-opted. Subaru didn't develop the car on their own. Sometimes automotive joint ventures are collaborative and produce great results.

As for what this Honda/Nissan joint venture will bring...who knows? I'm not optimistic, but I'd love to be proven wrong. Sadly, unlike the origin story of the twins, I don't think the current joint venture started with a bunch of Toyota engineers showing up at Subaru with a cut-down, hopped-up, RWD-converted Legacy made into a coupe, saying, "Hey gang...check this out!" 

It's always been Nissan - 

In reply to Datsun240ZGuy :

1971 is far from always 

My 60 Datsun pickup had the same plate though.

The automotive industry is pivoting on technology right now. Development of electric vehicles. There are a large number of companies that have a sunset year for internal combustion within the next 10 years for their products. Electric vehicles are coming. We have seen the first wave, it's receding a bit, but the next waves are coming. Charging infrastructure gets bigger every day. In the meantime hybrids are the projected bridge for those who are still leery of being beholden to that infrastructure. I think almost every company in the next 5 years will have some degree of electrification on more than 80% of their vehicles.

Vehicles have less and less similarity to what we traditionally think of and become more like a cell phone or other piece of tech every year. Infotainment gets to be a bigger and bigger consideration, more money and research going there. 

ADAS - people want a car that can go down the highway with as little attention as possible. Automated robo-taxies have suffered a major hit with the reality of the almost infinite number of edge cases. One of the biggest players, Cruise, got wrapped up and absorbed by GM with the assets being shifted to improving their assistance features.

So bringing that all back. Honda has done well in hybrids, but lacks full EV development. Recent co-work with GM seems to have fizzled out. The Honda prologue is basically a Blazer EV, but future joint developments seem to have disappeared. Nissan had the leaf but that is very antiquated in the current market already. Honda hasn't lead in ADAS development, but has more than Nissan. So both companies have big areas to play catch-up. Teaming up to do it makes sense if you can't basically buy in with a company that's already there. 

I've heard from more than one "source" that this is the Japanese government voluntelling Honda to do this to avoid the Nissan dumpster fire being bought by a Chinese company. 
 

If that's true, I doubt much good will come of it. I suppose they could share components, which could be beneficial for Nissan. If I were anyone at Honda I'd be pretty leery about receiving anything/ideas from Nissan.