Please rotary gods, bless Mazda to fill the hole in sports cars. Nissan/Infiniti going the way of the original rotary cars I am not a fan of. I'd hate to have to jump to Porsche, especially because the ones I can afford are almost as old as me.

 

Very good piece in that it pulled together all the facts and history which led to this point into what felt like an objective documentary.

I see the merger with Honda as an accretive thing to some degree, but I would definitely like to see the Honda customer and dealership experience expand and influence the future of both brands. Preferring to sell one car today vs. two tomorrow is a big piece of what destroyed their brand loyalty, led to lower sales which in turn restricted investment in R&D, etc. The will also need to figure out what Nissan wants to be under Honda. The fact that they make so many low cost econoboxes isn't exciting to us, but it is exciting to larger generations of Gen Y-Zers getting started in life and wanting something respectable to drive.

Mike's unqualified opinion would be:
1.
Appeal to your largest demographic (Gen X and Y):
-Thin out the low end of Nissan and keep a couple of popular low cost ICE models like the Altima (1) and Rogue (2) and price them such that they are a step below Civic and CRV, which people will pay premiums to drive based on an impeccable reputation. Give target buyers a roadmap.
-Address the elephant in the room. Gen X and Boomers (even older millennials) don't need anymore 60-150K luxury electric cars with thigh messages, we barely drive as we have reached a point in our careers where we work from home, and when we are in the car for work, we are driving to an airport to fly somewhere. Turn the Leaf into an EV version of the Volkswagen Bug - "peoples car" (3) for young people, 9-5 retail workers, laborers, etc. that are grinding out commutes every day and putting 12-20k miles a year on cars. License Tesla charging technology and leverage their network. Make the car something people are proud to park in their driveway and make payments on. Simple, timeless design that doesn't look like an insect (current Leaf). China has these today, but I don't see them selling into NA in my lifetime.

2.
Appeal to one of the largest markets in the US, trucks:
Pick a segment and go after it with a high quality, (4) value based 1/4 ton body on frame truck (Ridgeline is unibody FWD). Limit bells and whistles on the base model and target trades people who don't care about Harley badges on the fender and storage for camping gear in the tailgate (that can be an aftermarket add on); take a piece of Ford's bread and butter. Then, have a version of that vehicle that's 4 wheel drive. Good motor, trans and chassis and create and aftermarket (NRD "Nissan Racing Dynamics") where people can slowly turn their simple 4x4 into an off road beast; it will be a long time before EVs cut this segment out, take advantage now and help people slowly achieve their vision of being disconnected and enjoying the best our planet has to offer. Focus on the journey for these folks, not the destination.

3.
We've beaten this horse to death. But at a high level, boomers and Gen Xers, while a smaller demographic, have more disposable income and hold on to the pieces of the past while we wait for our futures. Capitalize on nostalgia while leveraging iconic JDM Brands (which Honda and even Toyota lack compared to Nissan) like Skyline and Z. No more $150K super cars like the GTR or try to out-tech the Germans. Build a quality base platform with a solid aftermarket and OEM performance brand under "NRD". Issue recalls on your turbos, don't just stamp a new name on them or change FW to lower their rotational speed and claim they are upgraded.

Once you have this strategy in place, dump advertising dollars into the venture. Create a vision that everyone can embrace, from the retail worker to the boomer hungry to hold on to the past. Incentivize your sales network on moving people up through the roadmap into your premium cars. One and done doesn't work. "Let me talk to my manager" creeps people out. If you sell the vision, people will shake the couch cushions to find the money they need to pay a fair price for transportation they are proud of and trust.

My 2 cents...or maybe its 4?

 

So what they'll actually do is upscale the Altima to $60k, introduce something like the Hyundai Santa Cruz but more expensive, and eliminate infiniti except for the huge SUV. /sarcasm

 

Does seem that everyone wants to use the same formula these days doesn't it?

Corp - Out with the B players to make room for the A players (Steve Jobs Biography)
Baseball - Swing for the fences or bust (Moneyball)
NFL - Throw the ball 90% of the time and always go for it on 4th down to show you have grit (borrowed from College football)
Automotive - Maximize profits by selling people on premium features that you don't feel they don't know they want yet, but won't be able to live without in time (Steve Jobs Biography)

 

This is why the local Audi dealer only has the Q5 PHEV models that are about $12k more expensive.

 

It's like everyone reads from the same playbook these days. Ask AWS (Cloud) for an answer as its too risky to use your gut.

 

At work I've been tasked with teaching multifamily housing managers about AI and all the source materials I've seen have basically said to use it instead of making decisions...

HARD PASS. They're asking ChatGPT before even using Google to look up the issue. Also, and I can't express my intense disgust at this enough, asking AI legal questions that it hallucinates on, and then arguing those hallucinations with their legal team (ie Me).

Handbasket, hell, etc. I'm getting old.

 

You are not alone.

I have partners building neural AI chips and targeting the replacement of tech support. They feel that everyone is chomping at the bit to have AI index reams of content and tell them the answer to their problem without having to be "bothered" with talking to someone.

Unfortunately, I am resistant to that camp and feel that most of what I know was learned through discourse, including BSing with the cable company retention reps to get a 75% discount on high speed internet service, or convincing a vendor to send me a replacement of something they sold me because I screwed the first one up. Z1 is the perfect example and I have no issue paying a little more to leverage their expertise and care.

Also, slightly tangential. My car stereo guy told me that theft has become so rampant due to key fob and keyless entry hacks, that aftermarket providers are now selling kits to convert modern cars back to keyed access. I'm like ****, I should have thought of that.



.

 

When I graduated college the big thing was Enterprise Resource Management systems like SAS. You reshape your whole way of doing business to fit their software, plug every imaginable bit of data in, and it was supposed to provide non-obvious insights and trends to make your company more efficient and responsive to shifting markets.

Didn't work well - companies tripled their labor costs just to 'feed the monkey' and rarely got insights a midpack MBA couldn't see.

New LLM fad seems to be this again.

Mandatory car stuff: Inf should make slightly nicer PHEV versions of existing well-sold Nissans. They could become the Hybrid/plug-in BEV part of Nissan. An Infiniti Leaf with performance goodies might be fun...

 

Before AI, what you're describing was called Business Intelligence. The trick for BI companies was to position services as a product. The quick money was in licensing sales as a regularly reoccurring income, but the meat on the bone were services billed at astronomically high hourly rates.

At least, that's one way to look at it. Another would be if a corporation genuinely sees a benefit, then more power to them. At the end of the day, all software is a hack, and all companies are trying to maximize profit. Both can be true.

 

As part of my undergrad senior project, we were helping Vanity Fair implement their company in SAS. All based on Oracle SQL which I actually liked, but didn't see a living in it for me. Then (eventually) I went to law school to get OUT of IT lol...

SAS/ERP made a lot of sense and the examples given were legit... but IMHO any larger company with decent first-line and C-suite managers already knew the connections via experience. Small companies with rapid growth benefited for sure, since they didn't have that kind of biz intel analysis.

Oddly enough, that's essentially what my wife did at Boeing - Executive decision support analysis. Mostly using Excel to make sense of the actual Boeing databases.

 

Doesn't matter how big, expensive or extensive a company's internal software may be, at the end of the day individuals are making sense of their data with Excel. The world runs on spreadsheets.

 

in a different part of life, I taught community college courses on computers - everything from 'this is a mouse' to writing your own functions in Excel with VBA. What my wife can do with Excel, I can't even adequately describe. Didn't help tho when the local management makes decisions on data but the corporate management nixes it.

 

Spreadsheets have ruined corporate America. 40% of my time anymore is cross functionally managing and reporting on the marginal opportunity data rolled up in a dozen spreadsheets and even worse, Dashboards.

 

LOL

"This number is wrong. Why is this number wrong?"

Two days later, after eye bleeding review of the mathematical gymnastics behind that magical number, turns out to be correct.

99% of the time it's wrong because of specifications, not implementation.