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.
Nah.
Honda has a much better product in the first place, their engineering approach has always been better than Nissan (I say this having worked on every major brand, and some unknowns).
Nissan is one of the better ones, but they’re still a big step away from Honda.
And Honda was working on hydrogen nearly 30 years ago now, which seems poised to suplant batteries (again, maybe).
Hydrogen cannot supplant batteries in mass market cars. It doesn’t make sense, primarily for reasons concerning the laws of physics.
It takes a tremendous amount more energy to power a hydrogen car.
Use a lot of electricity to split water into Hydrogen and Oxygen, force the oxygen to react with another substance leaving pure hydrogen, siphon it away, spend more energy compressing it to bomb-like pressures (or alternatively cooling it until it becomes a liquid, at great energy cost), transport it to hydrogen stations, pump it into cars, do reverse hydrolysis (also incurring a large energy loss) to turn it back into electricity to charge a battery to power an electric motor. [Bonus: since the battery is tiny, it can’t supply a huge amount of power instantaneously - making hydrogen cars far slower than a typical EV.]
OR:
Take that electricity, send it over some wires with over 95% energy efficiency, charge a battery that powers an electric motor.
Then there’s the safety considerations for the cars because they have highly compressed hydrogen on board, the same is true for hydrogen fueling stations which cost a fortune and have an unbelievable amount of red tape. Meanwhile it’s easy and cheap to add charging points everywhere, because practically everywhere already has electricity.
Their range isn’t even much better, because not only is the energy density really bad compared to petrol or diesel, you’re also compromised on fuel tank size due to it having to be small, spherical, unlikely to be struck in a crash (ie must be put in an inconvenient place re: car packaging) and phenomenally structurally strong, all to prevent it from exploding like compressed hydrogen likes to do.
There’s a reason why despite every manufacturer toying with hydrogen vehicles for decades, there’s basically only the Mirai that you can actually buy, for an awful price, and it’s a shit car, while there are several hundred EVs out there right now. One is a viable car technology, and one is basically an EV with a long list of compromises.
https://www.hyundaiusa.com/us/en/vehicles/nexo
Hyundai has one only available in CA.
And Honda was working on hydrogen nearly 30 years ago now, which seems poised to suplant batteries (again, maybe).
LOL, no. Hydrogen has never been anything but a greenwashing scam. Even if it were all produced from electrolysis (and to be clear, it isn’t – the vast majority is produced from fossil fuels), it would still be stupidly cumbersome to deal with compared to adding some carbon to it to make synthetic gasoline.
Lol, hydrogen. A chronological oddity. Has spent the last 30+ years just 10 years away from being viable.
I got excited because I saw a Honda EV, a prologue. Looked it up, it’s a rebranded Chevy Blazer. Honda is absolutely fucked…
How about YAY!?
We need more smaller brands, not less bigger brands. It ALWAYS without exception leads to a destination where consumers get screwed.
I celebrate this failure, let them compete and let more smaller brands pop up, please
There’s no situation I would call Nissan a “smaller brand” of anything.
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.
