mtn said:
In reply to NickD :
I have been trying to figure that out. All I can figure is some RWD Infiniti platforms, that are frankly outdated, and trucks, which are also outdated?
Production facilities?
Assuming they pare down the model lineup to less than the collective total lineup is now, then yes, I'd expect them to end up with more production capacity and more engineering capacity per model potentially. And as much as the Nissan trucks are dated and not big sellers, they're not necessarily bad trucks. And particularly in the case of the Titan, they're beefier than any truck Honda has built themselves. I'd personally expect that the Frontier may go away in favor of keeping the Ridgeline, but the Titan would give Honda an opportunity to make some improvements and go after a chunk of Toyota's Tundra sales without having to engineer a body on frame truck from ground 0.
In reply to rslifkin :
Nissan tried and failed to break into the both the 1/2 ton and 3/4 ton market agaisn't the big 3.
I've owned both a 1st gen titan halfton and a 2nd gen Titan XD and both were good trucks that nobody knows about.
The big 3's advantage is the brand loyalty and the multiple drivetrain options to fit nearly any buyer.
I don't see Honda being silly enough to try it again.
Up here the Frontier as priced as premium trucks and don't seem to sell well either.
Perhaps if they cut the pricing and sell those as a budget truck(I think they'd sell like hotcakes deeply discounted)and leave the Ridgeline as the completely different flavour of truck it is that might work better for both.
kevlarcorolla said:
In reply to rslifkin :
Nissan tried and failed to break into the both the 1/2 ton and 3/4 ton market agaisn't the big 3.
I've owned both a 1st gen titan halfton and a 2nd gen Titan XD and both were good trucks that nobody knows about.
The big 3's advantage is the brand loyalty and the multiple drivetrain options to fit nearly any buyer.
I don't see Honda being silly enough to try it again.
Up here the Frontier as priced as premium trucks and don't seem to sell well either.
Perhaps if they cut the pricing and sell those as a budget truck(I think they'd sell like hotcakes deeply discounted)and leave the Ridgeline as the completely different flavour of truck it is that might work better for both.
I don't see many Frontiers around, but I do see at least some Titans. I see more Tacomas and Tundras than either though. Personally, I don't see a reason why Nissan/Honda couldn't do as well as Toyota in that segment, especially considering Honda seems to do ok at selling Ridgelines.
NickD
MegaDork
1/3/25 4:09 p.m.
rslifkin said:
mtn said:
In reply to NickD :
I have been trying to figure that out. All I can figure is some RWD Infiniti platforms, that are frankly outdated, and trucks, which are also outdated?
Production facilities?
Assuming they pare down the model lineup to less than the collective total lineup is now, then yes, I'd expect them to end up with more production capacity and more engineering capacity per model potentially. And as much as the Nissan trucks are dated and not big sellers, they're not necessarily bad trucks. And particularly in the case of the Titan, they're beefier than any truck Honda has built themselves. I'd personally expect that the Frontier may go away in favor of keeping the Ridgeline, but the Titan would give Honda an opportunity to make some improvements and go after a chunk of Toyota's Tundra sales without having to engineer a body on frame truck from ground 0.
The Titan bit the dust already. Nissan killed it off at the end of last year, after pretty dismal sales. The best year of sale was 86,945 in the very first year (2009) and they never came close to that ever again. By 2009, they were below 20k a year, and other than a brief blip in '17, '18 and '19, they never broke above 30k since then.
In reply to rslifkin :
For sure,mostly marketing and perception keeping the frontier from being a better seller.
To sell they need to be much better priced,a hybrid option would certainly help as well.
The Titan was completely killed off for the Canadian market a couple yrs ago
I had a thought that I would like if it happened... what if Honda made Nissan into something like Scion.
Then I realized scion didn't work out for Toyota, why would the same thing work for Honda? I'm just missing Scion. Cheap, plucky, reliable cars. Nothing like it anymore.
NickD
MegaDork
2/5/25 10:23 a.m.
I just saw where Nissan is reportedly trying to call off the Honda-Nissan merger. Apparently, despite the $39 billion gulf in their values, Nissan doesn't like that Honda would be in total control and feels like it should be a 50/50 partnership
NickD said:
I just saw where Nissan is reportedly trying to call off the Honda-Nissan merger. Apparently, despite the $39 billion gulf in their values, Nissan doesn't like that Honda would be in total control and feels like it should be a 50/50 partnership
If true, that feels very much like a Nissan thing to demand, haha. The way I see this is Honda is throwing out a lifeline to a brand with robust manufacturing assets, rather than it being a strategic partnershipp.
As a result of this news, Nissan shares fell 4% in value while Honda shares went up by 8%.
In reply to einy (Forum Supporter) :
Sounds about right.
Im wondering why Nissan thinks Honda should be 50:50 with them? Based on legacy perhaps?
Right now I don't want a single one of your products with the possible exception of a Frontier just because I actually like that it's basically an outdated model, same with the GTR (not even sure you make that anymore). You're behind several automakers in every segment.
If it was 1995 I'd say yeah, but not now.
NickD said:
I just saw where Nissan is reportedly trying to call off the Honda-Nissan merger. Apparently, despite the $39 billion gulf in their values, Nissan doesn't like that Honda would be in total control and feels like it should be a 50/50 partnership
Probably the C suite would see more payout in selling the company for parts than the merger.
the Japanese government wants this to happen and will push both sides ,
They would really "lose face" if Nissan was broken up , or merged with Honda but lost the Nissan name .
CyberEric said:
Im wondering why Nissan thinks Honda should be 50:50 with them? Based on legacy perhaps?
Because they're hubristic morons, who, after spending 30 years following in the footsteps of, and having been rewarded with promotions by the hubristic morons in front of them, are unwilling to have their egos bruised by serving under, or being let go by, actual successful executives.
The shareholders of Nissan should sue to remove the executives holding up the deal and try and complete the merger.
If I were the Honda shareholders, I'd sue to prevent the Honda executives from performing the Harakiri this merger represents for them.
ГУЛАГ мальчик УР следующий said:
If I were the Honda shareholders, I'd sue to prevent the Honda executives from performing the Harakiri this merger represents for them.
I can tell you that not one of us Honda associates wants this to happen. We received a private message from our Global VP before the holidays, where it was clearly stated that if this isn't good for Honda, that it will not happen.
ГУЛАГ мальчик УР следующий said:
CyberEric said:
Im wondering why Nissan thinks Honda should be 50:50 with them? Based on legacy perhaps?
Because they're hubristic morons, who, after spending 30 years following in the footsteps of, and having been rewarded with promotions by the hubristic morons in front of them, are unwilling to have their egos bruised by serving under, or being let go by, actual successful executives.
Just ask Boeing how well it works to let the corporate leadership, and thus culture, of the failing competitor you're buying infest your company.
In reply to Driven5 :
Not familiar Boeing mergers & acquisitions, but the large defense company I worked for followed similar patterns of the buying company becoming the dominant culture.
Lots of the bought company's managers "retire to spend more time with their families". In some cases really good managers.
What I've noticed, and to your point, any weaknesses the acquired company had will be exacerbated within that org, usually about a year after the good execs "retire". If the dominant (buying company) culture isn't an E36 M3 show, they'll recover ok by year 2 or 3.
If the buying company culture is also a E36 M3 storm, it goes from bad to worse and becomes an unbearable place to work.
That said, in the car business those cycles of disruption would have to be an absolute boat anchor. Daimler didn't own Chrysler for very long before they sold them off - and I think they lost a ton of money.
Nissan has to have a crappy culture, what else could possibly describe how they turn the marketing gold of an "all new Z" into a rebodied 370 sales flop?
Happy to see the merger dying, it would be sad to see a good company (Honda) get dragged down by a bad company (Nissan).
Nissan backs out of merger.
Nissan: Dunning-Kruger motors. What a joke- their IP is nothing special, the company is hemmoraging money and they expected a merger on equal ground with Honda?
I'll be relieved when this deal is (hopefully) finally dead.
Nissan's fall is ironic for those of us who read this book 35+ years ago:
For those who haven't, it's a contrast between the fortunes of Ford and Nissan in the early to mid 80s. Ford had been declining for years and Nissan could do no wrong. Here it is, 40 years later, and while they aren't setting the world on fire, Ford is still around and a major player, while Nissan is circling the drain. In those days, a lot of people thought that there was something in the Japanese culture that just made them better at building cars and running a successful business.
Driven5
PowerDork
2/13/25 2:53 p.m.
Tom_Spangler (Forum Supporter) said:
In those days, a lot of people thought that there was something in the Japanese culture that just made them better at building cars and running a successful business.
Or might it have been true and it's just that the decades long US plan, to bring the rest of the world down to our level and beat them with experience, is working?
Speaking from the standpoint of someone who lived in S. Korea for 15 years, and is closing in on one year in Japan, there's some cultural stuff that might explain Nissan's very strange decision.
Compared to the US, East Asia in general is very concerned with "face." This has some good parts - it largely replaces internalized guilt - but it also has some bad parts - it sometimes requires you to continue propping up fictions you've invested in constructing. Nissan seems to feel it has a lot of "face" to protect, and probably can't afford to admit the obvious truth that some jumped up motorcycle manufacturer is not just equal, but far better at making cars.
Compared to SK, Japan has a real aversion to tearing things up and starting over. This manifests in a ton of little stuff. The banking system runs on software platforms from the early 90s because updates cause inconvenience. The subway system runs more or less like something out of the 1970s because switching to something more modern requires customers to learn new procedures. The written language itself is a monument to avoiding re-starts at all cost. Japanese uses two completely redundant alphabets because getting rid of one would require change. Its use of Chinese characters is devilishly complex and a million times harder than Chinese itself, and every single local eccentricity in expression gets copied into the standard dialect with almost no pruning because simplification would require looking at the system as a whole. Korea had a similar problem but solved it 600 years ago by switching to Hangeul. China updates itself once every century or so by standardizing and simplifying the characters. Japanese has literally never updated or simplified even once. I mention this because the Japanese auto industry has been defined by a limited number of manufacturers for a while and, well, mergers would cause fundamental changes in a large part of said industry. Starting over must be avoided.
Interesting. Thanks for sharing. Would you be willing to share more how saving face "replaces internalized guilt?"
Seems like Nissan are saving face right into the grave. But I'm more or less pleased, I prefer Honda unmolested by Nissan.
In reply to CyberEric :
I'd be happy to expand a little.
There are basically two ways to enforce "moral" behavior. The dominant approach in traditionally Abrahamic cultures (Christian, Jewish, Muslim) tends to be internalized guilt. This is built upon the idea that your moral compass should be context independent (mostly) and that even if nobody ever knows that you did wrong, you will know it and the knowledge will bother you. The good side of this is that people tend to be more likely to play by the rules even when they don't have to, or when they can cheat easily. The bad side is that internalized guilt doesn't feel great and tends to have long-term mental health consequences.
The dominant approach in East Asia is face/honor. I don't know if you've read any Homer, but that's the closest Western analogue I can think of. In this system, the moral behavior is enforced by neighbors, classmates, coworkers, etc. You absolutely need to meet certain standards in public, and the consequences for violating these norms can be pretty brutal. People will just lock you out of EVERYTHING, most often. The bad side is that this tends to be more strictly conformist, and it can lead to some pretty shocking public life/private life hypocrisies. The good side is that it lets you "misbehave" in a lot of settings where misbehaving doesn't matter very much, and you don't have to feel guilty about it.
Sex stuff is a good example. People have a lot of freedom to find extra-marital partners as long as it's kept private. It's usually not at all okay to be homosexual openly, but as long as you shut up about it, there's almost no consequence to having a same sex partner on the side. Stuff like that.
