Bye Bye Nissan

It's being reported that the merger between Nissan and Honda is now off the cards, after negotiations broke down.

It was reported at the time that Nissan had about 6 weeks at most of time to negotiate a rescue package, otherwise it would go to the wall.

So it seems Nissan have taken the decision to fold instead of continue as part of a group of companies. 

I've never owned a Nissan, so I don't have first hand experience of their vehicles, but they made some cool vehicles. The Skyline/GT-R for starters, plus the Z-cars and other sport coupes like the 200SX and even the lardy 300ZX.

Some funky vehicles like the cube and Figaro.

20 years ago they made worthy and reliable cars that quickly became pensioner favourites. People of a certain age will remember people of a certain age driving the Bluebird and the Primera.

But things went awry. The relationship with Renault soured a pristine company. Their cars seemingly no longer built for reliability. You don't put up with cheap plastics and hideous designs like the later blobby Micra models if the thing is unreliable. 

Design went down the toilet. Not only with technical reliability, but with design disasters like the Juke.

The Qashqai was at one time the best selling car in the UK, but oh my god, it's a bland piece of design. The only things that made the Qashqai the sales giant it was, were the finance and leasing deals Nisan used to shift the things. That's the French influence right there: concentrate on the finance and not the cars. The cars are a means to a finance deal.

Nisan had other fundamental disasters like the chassis rust  and folding chassis issues with the Navara and Pathfinder thanks to using cheap steel for fabrication.

Issues with the Diesel engines also plagued certain models, but to be honest, that's the same for other manufacturers that have tried to keep up with impossibly strict emissions regulations.

Even when Nissan embraced the new electric car revolution, they stumbled. The Leaf was one of the early electric models from any manufacturer, but it was built down to a price. The lack of heat management of the battery meant the battery failed earlier than those that did have thermal management. 

Under the leadership of Carlos Gohsn, (the CEO who eventually got smuggled out of Japan in a music case) which started in 2001, Nissan went from worthy to washout. The GT-R was the last technical tour-de-force, but as the noughties progressed, the projects that were started before Gohsn came and went. What followed were pretty poor shadows of the reliable models that went before.

Nissan as a company stared to slide. 

The tale is the same as with other Japanese car manufacturers that found themselves with issues in the early 2000s. They allowed the Western car manufacturers to buy stakes in the company, usually just under majority shares. The Western companies gave the Japanese companies "advice" on how to build cars cheaper and maximise profits. 

In almost all cases that ended up with the Japanese companies making an inferior product when it came to quality and longevity. 

20 years later, we are here. At the end, almost. Sad.