How Nissan and Honda's $60B merger talks collapsed(reuters.com) |
How Nissan and Honda's $60B merger talks collapsed(reuters.com) |
Carlos Ghosn was able to "turn Nissan around", but it was at the expense of future product capabilities (in my opinion) [Disclosure I work for GM, this is solely my own opinion]
Also, I must say that it is not clear to me that anyone could know what a long term winning play looked like 10-15 years ago when the damage was done (in my opinion). It takes a lot of effort and money to make a mediocre automobile, it takes a lot more to make a high quality automobile.
Technical competence is generally very hard to judge and often even harder replace. It's not surprising that the same management types are salivating at the thought of replacing people with AI.
By all estimations he's a genius with as good of chops as anyone could ask for his responsibilities, with a unique set of citizenship, connections, and multilingualism to go with it. Even his escape from Japan was just stunningly executed and the perfect selection of professionals with technical competence to pull it off.
They missed the electric wave sure, but as with any innovations the more competent you are in the previous wave of technology the harder it is to switch to the new one. But it's a different kind of problem.
At an end-user level it always was easy to judge that Honda was at the top for technical competence. The same it true for judging the bottom rung. You can judge by favoring high quality products, or by disfavoring businesses that try to sell you on sizzle and "fun". It's all the same.
I was under the impression it mostly failed because of how bad it was at software, and the strategy tax hitting them heavily as their ecosystem was penalized by that weakness, so I'd be glad to hear a different take.
The company comes into being to make widget x, and never cares / is able to make another product again.
I mean, that's kind of how it all happens anyway. The people who stick through things and make the thing go away anyway. the ip is then acquired.
It depends. If you see a lot of insider buying after a bottom it can be a good sign that there's strong internal faith in the companies future. I've used it as a buy signal myself before when a market cap is high enough. It has paid off.
> it is not clear to me that anyone could know what a long term winning play looked like 10-15 years ago
Well it probably _wasn't_ partnering with a Chinese state company to try to expand the brand there. That was a poison pill.
The issue is that power got to his head and truly believe he was the second coming of Jesus or something, and stopped improving his companies to rub shoulders with the Nepo CEO/aristocrat crowd. Had he continued the push toward affordable EV, Nissan could have been BYD, but R&D stopped, for no visible reason.
My personal theory is that the fallout from his divorce estranged him from his early friends and his closest advisor (his wife) and idiotic sycophants made him believe he was above the law and deserved even more. I've heard a lot of good things about pre-2008 Goshn, from people who aren't usually glazing billionaires, so maybe I'm biased.
Yes, I've noticed that people having nasty public fights with family members can lead to extremely negative effects on decision making.
There was an interesting interview with him where he commented on the, then, still active negotiations about a possible merge of Nissan and Honda.
Very interesting to listen to. He identified that there was essentially no synergy between the two and that a merger doesn't really make sense for either company. They don't really complement each other. After the merger, you'd merely have two of each in a gigantic company that isn't performing great. Similar cars, going after similar buyer segments, competing EV strategies and related investments, etc. Except Honda is a bit better than Nissan. So, they'd be ending up inheriting a lot of problems whereas Nissan wouldn't really gain anything they don't already have.
The core issue is that Nissan in particular needs to adjust course and is not willing to do that. That's also the reason this deal is collapsing: Honda doesn't want to make Nissan their problem and Nissan is rejecting the notion that they need to change.
Ghosn's analysis was pretty sharp: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljewn28Korw
Well in all fairness he is above the law. He walked out of Japan and is free in his country.
Nissan is clearly an anchor, and acquiring it would have just dragged Honda down .
I have a friend who worked for Honda as an engineer in the past decade and he concurred. He said the goal was seemingly to make everything as "mid" as possible.
Their utter snoozing on the hybrid/EV game is baffling. I am not sure how much of that was a failure to see the future, and how much of that was (perhaps?) due to Toyota snapping up a bunch of patents on basic concepts.
My extremely loose understanding is that you can't realistically build a hybrid without licensing a bunch of Toyota's patents, but, I could be wrong. (I mention it in the hopes that somebody with actual understanding can confirm or correct)
TIL that Nissan has an EV strategy, other than "build the world's first mass-market EV (Leaf), then ignore it for a decade".
https://www.msn.com/en-xl/news/other/honda-s-ceo-struggles-t...
The merger/buyout collapsed because Nissan is too proud to admit that they have failed and aren't in any position to be making demands.
Also, this is a tangent but with the US Steel buyout/investment from Nippon Steel being a common subject matter these days, remember what Japan did to protect Nissan every time they bitch about the US protecting US Steel. What goes around comes around.
Not in Asia, the worlds biggest car market, and where the worlds biggest car making country is. More than anything, low end electric cars are MASSIVELY popular in China.
As stated in the article - "the merger talks unravelled in a little more than a month due to Nissan's pride and insufficient alarm about its predicament"
More critically, Japanese automakers have always tried to diversify away from Japan as part of the "Flying Geese" paradigm.
For example, Toyota and Honda truly became "American", Mitsubishi truly became "Southeast Asian" (Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam), Isuzu became "Thai", and Suzuki became "Indian".
Nissan on the other hand tried a foreign expansion with the Datsun in the 1960s-80s, but that crashed and burned horribly, and reduced their appetite to expand abroad.
Post-Datsun, most of their international expansion tied their future to Brazil, China, and India as part of the Renault-Nissan partnership under Carlos Ghosn, but that itself came very late (early 2000s) and other players (domestic, international, and Japanese) were well established in those markets already.
Furthermore, Nissan Group's prestige division Nissan Shatai is too entwined politically to Kyushu, which scuttled the merger as Honda would have shut down Nissan's Kyushu factories which represent much of Nissan's capex.
Fundamentally, Nissan's leadership has a low appetite of taking risks abroad after the failure of Datsun, and this would have been toxic for an internationally minded Japanese firm like Honda who has stronger PMF abroad compared to domestically in Japan.
1. Supply chains and key raw materials mostly controlled by China
2. Japan's demographic collapse
3. Japanese Gen Z fed up with an unwinnable rat race where they live to just pay rent and groceries
[1] https://carnewschina.com/2025/01/13/byd-surpass-toyota-in-ja...
But somewhere you need synergies. Common rail, for chassis, gearboxes, engines. Diverge on fit out, but share parts.
Nobody in Oz buys Honda Utes. Loads of Nissan tradie vehicles.
It collapsed because they didn't want to change.
Whoever was pushing it for whatever reason, basically none of involved parties were interested in it, other than that everyone agreed that hypothetically combining Nissan and Honda would create some accumulated capitals.
When Ghosn got arrested, the Alliance Renault-Nissan was shredded to pieces. Many in Europe (including myself) were betting on a Nissan survival and a quick death of Renault.
Renault that was the sick dog of the French automotive industry for decades. Mainly due to bad business decisions and a lot of debt dating from before the arrival of Carlos Ghosn. With Ghosn in exile and no clear successor: there were very little optimism in Europe about the survival of Renault.
But ironically: that could not be farther from the Truth.
Renault get away with a pretty well executed electrification. It is now hyped and healthy.
Several models have been acclaimed by critics [1] and are even qualified as 'sexy' by the younger generation. It also sells well: The Megan EV sells well, so does the R5 and the Scenic. Renault even outsells Stellantis in Europe[2]: Something that did not happen for decades.
And near to that Nissan, the big one in the story, seems to go from bad to worst.
Nissan's stocks are going straight to the ground and with pretty worrying financial status. Nissan seems stucked with a conservative Japanese high level management unable to understand nor execute the changes the brand need. They completely miss the electrification: The leaf is outdated, the Ariya arrived late and full of problems[3]. And the rest of the product ranges do not sell well at all outside of Japan.
Nissan need urgently help, and pretty much nobody want to work with them in Japan.
This is again one of this twist of fate that only the automotive world is able to provide.
[1]: https://www.topgear.com/car-reviews/renault/megane-e-tech-el...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/europe...
[3]: https://www.ariyaforums.com/threads/so-many-issues-with-less...
What I don't get is how Nissan exited so many segments it did well in... Look at off-road SUVs: Jeep is making a killing selling Wranglers, Ford can't keep Broncos in stock, Toyota is now selling 4Runners AND Land Cruisers in the US, where's the new Xterra?
Compact to midsize trucks are all the rage too, Nissan basically ignored that segment not updating the Frontier for what, 15 years? Then coming out with a new Frontier that is already 10 years behind on arrival...
They squandered their first mover advantage in EVs...
They literally gave up on everything that isn't a cheap shitbox, all they seem to sell is bland, cheap small SUVs and cars. Meanwhile a bunch of segments they used to care about are exploding.
Honda meanwhile doesn't really have any hits other than the Civic and maybe CR-V... Their SUVs are boring, their cars are boring, they have no off roader, never seen one of their EVs (according to their website it exists). Hyundai/Kia are doing everything Honda is doing but better. Honda has racing pedigree and probably could be doing something interesting but they just aren't.
An actual merger with a new name and some new energy could have revitalized them both and allowed them to escape the past if neither of them want to play to their historical strengths anyway... Honda making Nissan a subsidiary though is also old thinking, and just ain't it.
You can see this in car price explosion and tanking profits.
The result will be consolidation and further automotive inflation.
Companies are so much more than the consumer experience.
Japanese companies like Nissan and Honda are a bit on that losing side. Quite literally; both are struggling with rapidly reducing demand for their now clearly obsolete vehicles and the ramp up of the production of competitive EV replacements for those.
Nissan basically dialed back investments after they got rid of Ghosn and the collaboration with Renault. Which was actually producing some early successes. Like the Nissan Leaf. They could have doubled down on that but they didn't.
Now years later they are basically facing a lot of issues with with an outdated product portfolio that can't keep up with new EVs from others grabbing lots of their market share in most of their key markets.
The reason the Nissan-Honda merger was on the table at all is that it really has gotten that bad for both of them. And of course merging two poorly performing companies doesn't result in a situation where the sum of the parts is larger than the value of the parts.
The reason this deal bounced (and was probably a bad idea to begin with) is that Nissan is in denial about their existential need to adapt to the changing market. EVs are at the center of that.
I cant stand Teslas, and tesla look alikes, they feel like sitting inside of an iPad. I think GWM has the right of it. Just pump out hybrids and EV's that feel as much the same as an ICE vehicle as possible. Let the customer decide.
Mazda is also minority-owned by Mitsubishi Group and Toyota Group and co-owns plenty of plants with Toyota, so it's a different story from Nissan Group which retains independence.
At this point, Mazda is an OEM for Toyota Group, and previously they were an OEM for Ford.
Mazda is a huge outlier in manfacturing because they are small, but have motorsports calibre/history (meaning they have a history of homologating sports cars.)
Mazda sells an order of magnitude less cars than even newer companies like BYD. Even less than isuzu. Because of this, they can more tightly control investor expectations, profit/loss. The stock value rarely changes, nevermind grows, so investors are confident in stability and dividends.
AKA, if you work at mazda, you aren't gonna be seen as a mega rich engineer. If you invest in mazda, you know you're gonna be able to sell at any point without much worry.
That said, I see no future for mazda beyond acqusition by chinese firm. It Manufactures in far too high COL countries, sells for too cheap, Self cannabalizing (9 different SUV models), too tight of a CUV market, lack of brand identity.....and the biggest issue, they cannot afford to r and d another miata gen, another RX-7,8 gen.
mazda desperetely needs a cash infusion, or joining into a much wider network with more selling power. Until then, I fear they will coast down the same road as Mitsubishi in the us.
Sales of EVs in Japan fell 33% y/y to 59,736 cars in 2024, the first decline in 4 years.
EV's share of all vehicle sales fell below 2% in Japan
The current crop of Chinese electric car makers are all trying to fake it until one of them makes it and the money spigot keeping them afloat will eventually get turned off at some point.[0] Good luck keeping that flashy EV running when the company goes bust.
[0]https://www.businessinsider.com/chinese-evs-losses-widen-des...
Premium cars that aren't so premium as to be disposable (i.e. not a luxury car you're gonna trade in every 3-5yr like clockwork) always last really well because people who can afford nice things can generally afford to maintain them.
This is pretty clearly borne out when you compare same cars across brand e.g. Ford Lincoln Mercury panther platform cars) or look at the exceptions like all those objectively terrible northstar caddilacs and v12 Jags and whatnot that are in impeccable shape because they got used and maintained nicely for a decade before being "retired" to the garage of the owner's vacation property on Cape Cod or perhaps the Hamptons or compare airport people moving vans that were retired to church group service to work vans that got sold down the river to even harder service.
It's really easy to "well we really should sell a water pump while we're in here for your 100k timing service" on a Subaru owned by someone who can afford a Subaru vs selling a preventative transmission fluid change to the guy who could barely scrape together the down payment on a Sentra.
I'm being a little sloppy and leaving some loose ends and room for nitpicking jerks to wedge in but I think the point here is pretty clear.
Tesla/Nio are a bad examples - many EVs were built to be sold and essentially ignored by the manufacturer.
Compare these:
(germany) https://population.un.org/wpp/graphs?loc=276&type=Probabilis...
(alternatively, Europe as a whole) https://population.un.org/wpp/graphs?loc=908&type=Probabilis...
(Japan) https://population.un.org/wpp/graphs?loc=392&type=Probabilis...
(China) https://population.un.org/wpp/graphs?loc=156&type=Probabilis...
to this one
(US) https://population.un.org/wpp/graphs?loc=840&type=Probabilis...
A key aggravating factor is most countries in the first group have stagnating productivity and the country in the second group has raising productivity on top. This creates a compound advantage for the country in the second group.
It seems likely to me that there is almost no degree of anti-national behavior the government of that country would need to exhibit or no amount of country-eroding policies that could forfeit this fundamental advantage. They'd need to get their country literally nuked or something similarly catastrophic.
Europe has largely converged on American growth, the East in particular continues to grow fast. But more important is that this is obviously an intentionally selective group of countries. Add Taiwan or South Korea to this story and it becomes a lot more complicated, because the latter is about to/has overtaken Japan on a per capita basis while having some of the worst demographics on the planet.
There's research by Keyu Jin that actually shows the opposite, globally growth after the year 2000 has been faster in aging countries for the simple reason that it increases returns on labor saving technology, i.e. automation (telling image:https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/13645.jpeg) and that is, even if you are conservative on technological developments in the next few decades, likely to accelerate quickly.
1. median IQ
2. skills
3. future unfunded liabilities (welfare, pensions, public health, etc)
I hope China learns this lesson an makes some changes. At least they have a bit more runway to do so.
* https://population.un.org/wpp/graphs?loc=124&type=Probabilis...
When shit hits the fan, there will be drastic changes, just like how Japan is accepting more and more immigrants every year. That tap will be cut of in a decade or two, because every country will be fighting for them unless we have some magical economical overhaul. I have zero clues what predictions can be made for 2050 in terms of demographics.
As for point 3 it also feels odd. When we check stats in the 3 Asian Tigers, the rat race (and young population sentiment around it) seems like Japan < South Korea <<< China. And usually my friends from those countries usually feel the same way. Lie down movement, all the frustration in SK showed to the world through their entertainment kinda shows this too.
It's quite possible to win a market with 30-50% of people liking you. Any if right wing customers buy Teslas for political reasons rather than utility they could reduce quality and increase pricing do even better financially.
They are widely cited as unreliable, poorly built vehicles. My neighbour bought a used model S and the first time he saw us after buying it he came over to justify his purchase ("Got a killer price, etc").
I don't know if that's true, but I find it all pretty funny regardless.
Five or more years ago, people hated Tesla drivers, either because they represented wealth or that they were seen as progressive 'tree huggers'.
Today people seem to hate Tesla drivers because the brand is for right wing nazis.
I think both takes are misguided, and I don't know how popular those takes are, but I can't help but finding the 180 humorous.
For context, I'm not taking a side and don't have a strong opinion either way. I don't own and wouldn't own one, but for reasons with nothing to do with politics or quality.
Now that other companies are making EVs that compete directly with Tesla, they aren't reliably best-in-class or best-in-price-point anymore. Compare the Rivian R1T to the Cybertruck, or the Equinox EV to the Model Y, or the Ioniq 6 to the Model 3. The top of the line Model S still doesn't really have any viable competitor.
Tesla has phenomenal battery and motor tech, but their actual car design leaves a lot to be desired, and that's starting to hurt them now that they aren't the only game in town.
And the fact that their CEO throws Nazi salutes at political rallies does not help their market share. In Europe at least that's directly impacting their sales.
Come now, even the Anti-Defamation League, hardly a habitual supporter of Musk, disagrees with this take. Your opinions are your own and you're free to believe he did Nazi salutes, but it does make you sound like you have an axe to grind.
And maybe your response to all of the above is that Tesla will not be allowed to fail as part of an industrial strategy on the part of America, in which case the question is why would the other domestic manufacturers like Ford and GM be allowed to fall by the wayside? And further, why would Japan not also embark on a similar strategy and prop up their domestic manufacturers?
Any way you look at it, a prediction that China wins out everywhere except for plucky old Tesla moving into the "Apple" position seems like some sort of bizarre partisanship/home team support that doesn't stand up to a moment of scrutiny.
It works for Apple. When you're premium you can charge 2x as much, because your market isn't as price-conscious.
> why wouldn't current halo manufacturers like BMW and Mercedes and Lexus also try for that market, and why are they sure to fail while Tesla succeeds?
They will. They're not. But Tesla has a fighting chance, in a way that companies trying to compete with China in the commodity EV market don't.
Tesla doesn’t make a car as nice as the Air Sapphire… I don’t think they could if they wanted to. So they’re forced to stay in the less expensive / less quality market segment
TBH if I were on Tesla's board I'd be pushing for a stock-funded takeover of a company that has an actual plan and ability to deliver it. Merge with (say) Stellantis and they'd have a survival plan.
Yes. This is also quite a twist of fate because 10-15y ago it was exactly the opposite.
Renault had the reputation of poor reliability with a lot of problems regarding electronics while the old TUs engines from PSA (now Stellantis) where rocks solid monsters you could bring to 300k km without a swet. Many of them are still alive and way over 1M km in northern Africa.
This applies to all Japanese car companies now. They've basically told China, "Please, take the loyal market we've built up these past 40 years. We don't need or want it. We want to die."
It makes no sense.
They're betting on ICE vehicles losing no demand and on "clean" hydrogen completely displacing all demand for electric vehicles entirely.
And a quick rundown on how clean hydrogen energy works in Japan: they burn coal or petroleum to make liquid hydrogen that will replace petroleum-burning vehicles. So instead of using fuel directly, they burn stable fuel that can be used in most cars to make unstable fuel that can't be used in any cars. Smart.
It is more complicated than that.
The Chinese government in the last decade made the life of foreign automotive brand un-manageable. Most of them (outside of the luxury market) are now getting out.
They enforces rules that are clearly designed for IP leaks and takeover. For instance: For every vehicule sold in China by Toyota and others, the source of the software need to be sent to the Chinese authorities.
This is not a market that the Japanese want to stay in: They know they are playing against someone that cheats with the rules.
I'm assuming you live in the US: how many US consumer companies could you cite that make product that are almost useless in the US ?
For instance, would you see Tesla make mainly cars that extremely well adapted to small and tortuous old european cities ? Or would you image Apple's next iPhone line to be fully revamped to only work with Felica NFC payments, dropping credit card and Apple Pay support ?
That is kind of how electric cars are positioned in Japan, and Toyota is a Japanese company. The market exists, but is marginal and not where the country is putting its weight on (I think you'll understand why nuclear energy in Japan much more controversial than in the US)
If you’re right about narcissism, one of the issues there is an inability to realize that he can be wrong. “Maybe I’m wrong about this” literally cannot occur to the narcissist, their entire worldview is built around their being right and anyone who disagrees with them is wrong (and therefore an enemy).
Asianometry: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsL6JAUZFiQ
In terms of safety, it came standard with backup cameras and low speed noise features that are now mandatory on all EVs in the US. In 2013 they introduced a heat-pump option and had features like heated seats and steering wheel to reduced the climate control draw on the meager battery.
The Tesla Model 3 that came out 5 years later didn't have low speed noise, heat-pump, or heated steering wheel. Though they were added later.
In terms of reliability, it just works, so many other EVs are completely unreliable and suffer from numerous issues, many of which have nothing to do with the EV platform. Tesla, Lucid, and VW all have or had issues with door handles. GM couldn't seem to make water proof batteries that didn't explode. Kia's EVs go through 12v batteries faster than a vibrator goes through AA batteries. BMWs are great right up until you DC Fast Charge them, at which point they like to go into limp mode and throw faults.
I kind of see many people that already have work there that have decade experience don't or can't "changes"
US consumer preference seems to weigh aesthetic appeal much more than other markets, even at the cost of function. Some other examples are the rugged boxy SUVs that have an aerodynamic/fuel economy penalty compared to their sleek blob counterparts, or the the coupe SUVs that sacrifice both rear headroom and storage capacity for a "sportier" look.
Also sedans do have a feature - less road noise than a hatchback.
The Leaf failed because a) fast charger support was poor (Chademo vs DC fast or NACS) and slow. b) battery thermal management STILL isn't acceptable and results in degradation.
We got one as a rental and it was really comfortable but I wouldn't buy it because of the above.
In Shanghai at one point the cost of a ICE vehicle registration cost more than a low end EV.
Though I wonder if EVs are really all that good without the infrastructure.. With state of the potholes and electric infrastructure in most countries, can EVs hold up?
Not a single major failure across 6 vehicles, except one Nissan Silvia (1992) that I used to race. Not really it's fault, I blew the motor pushing it hard for 3 years. I also crashed my first Silvia into a tree at 16, but it was running fine before that. That's how it got to the tree!
Even the 2007 Pathfinder and current 2003 Stagea are rock solid, and I consider them post-peak for Nissan.
Here are a couple sources.
https://www.ft.com/content/ea2329e4-b4bc-4e2d-be34-e9a8ea311...
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/05/business/tesla-germany-el...
So it sounds like their sakes were tiny before this halving. And with numbers that low, one ad campaign or new model by VW could change them.
His donations to parties in Germany seems like a weird reason why. He's done all sorts of things in the past, and sales went up.
Financial Times January 2025
https://www.ft.com/content/ea2329e4-b4bc-4e2d-be34-e9a8ea311...
All i see is competition. Companies cheat by relying on ip to begin with and it hurts the consumer.
Toyota is well known to have an entire division in Toyota China dedicated to re-develop their stack just for the local market due to this exact reason.
Oh and financial fraud appears to be one of the things he was good at based on the allegations from Nissan and Renault among others.
I’m only generally aware of the series of events here. Any good write ups?
There is a series on Apple as well.
Until maybe 10 years ago, I would have agreed that all or at least most of the Chinese products were no better than copies of Western products.
However during recent years, at least during the last 5 or 6 years, both among commercial products and among the published research papers, I have seen far more innovation from China than from USA.
Such underestimation of the capabilities of a competitor, like the assumption that without subsidies or lax regulations they would not still be better, can only doom USA.
While these claims about subsidies and lax regulations are ubiquitous in USA for justifying failures, I have yet to see any proof or any accurate numeric data supporting them.
I doubt that China really has laxer environmental regulations than USA. What is likely to happen is that in China it must be much easier to avoid the enforcing of the regulations, by bribing the authorities.
Perhaps there are governmental subsidies in China, but in USA I never see the start of any significant private investment without great subsidies, at least from the local government, in the form of various kinds of tax breaks.
This kind of governmental subsidies that are very common in USA are only seldom permitted in other countries, e.g. in Europe.
I full agree on this.
But what people also often miss is that wage levels are not even close to comparable. Chinese manufacturing pays an average of <$25k (purchasing parity adjusted, ~15k otherwise!!) for a 49h week.
It is absolutely expected that the US is not competitive in labor intensive industries, simply because Americans are rich. Trying to "fix" this with tariffs and relaxed regulations (to lure heavy industry/manufacturing back) is an expensive experiment doomed to fail, and taxpayers and consumers are gonna pay the price.
If you campaign with "we're gonna bring back tons of jobs that pay $5/hour, but don't worry, taxpayers/consumers are gonna pick up the difference", suddenly the whole thing does not sound that good any more.
And subsidies don't only affect the final price of a good: they also provide a company more funding for R&D. To say nothing of forced technology transfers via joint ventures.
The EU also still subsidizes a ton of industries, e.g. agriculture at €40.95 billion https://agriculture.ec.europa.eu/common-agricultural-policy/... (I'd agree that subsidies are needed to support a key sector like agriculture today, but they're still subsidies)
Here's an article stating VW got over €9b over 8 years, for example: https://www.wiwo.de/politik/deutschland/dax-subventionen-gel...
If that is true, BYD actually gets about the same as VW.
Also if Japan had a serious contender fr the EV space, a good CEO should be able to persuade their government subsidies are deserved. With a trifecta of corporate, union and environmentalist lobbying.
To put in perspective how bad that is, cities the West considers expensive:
Paris is 17x
London is 12x
NYC is 9.7x
San Francisco is 9x
---
Shanghai is down from peak but still at 33x, and that's a correction. Either people still can't afford to buy homes, or a large class of homeowners will become destitute elderly people and all that entails for social stability, or the government will have to make up the difference somehow.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-01-07/why-milli...
And notably the average loaded pickup truck -- the kind that fill every highway and road -- is more expensive than the average Tesla, so I don't think it has ever represented wealth, and the "people are jealous" thing has always been rather silly. One of the most common situations to see Teslas today are delivery vehicles and Ubers.
The honeymoon has worn off, though, and the blindness to the many design and build flaws of the vehicle, or the extremely anti-consumer behaviour of that company, has earned it a public sentiment that has declined. Now add that it is the primary wealth vehicle for one of the worst people on the planet, such that it started transitioning into pandering to let's call them bad people (the CyberJunk), and it's just a nameplate carrying a lot of negativity now.
>but I can't help but finding the 180 humorous.
The both-sidism thing is so incredibly boring. If everyone else didn't start making pretty good EVs, Tesla kept iterating and making better products with better quality and dealing with their customers better (instead of making ridiculous nonsense like their useless truck or robots or whatever else), and it wasn't associated with bankrolling a garbage huamn being, it would still be a beloved brand. But it isn't 2019 anymore.
Shits me too because I kinda dig the retro aesthetic of the cybertruck. Its just completely destroyed by any truck made by any other company, electric or not. And even if you can mod it to be functional as a truck, you still have to deal with that interior.
I suspect this may vary by location, or be more of an "online" thing maybe. I didn't know anyone who had any particular hate for Telsa drivers.
> Today people seem to hate Tesla drivers because the brand is for right wing nazis.
Again, I don't really know anyone today in my circles who dislike Tesla drivers themselves. Could be a big bias here though because I think I likely congregate by default with the tiny minority of people who can afford to buy a Tesla in the first place (or any such car here.)
I do know Tesla owners who are significantly less enthusiastic about their purchase today than they were when they acquired it and yes, its because of Elon, but they are not about to give up the car over it. They still like the car. Equally I know owners who remain thrilled and could give less of a shit.
Nobody outside of them really thinks about them much at all positively or negatively I would say. Some of them do seem to have a tendency to assume everyone will have as much interest as they do in their car but I am sure many such cars inspire people to this kind of zealotry, like...hardware computing brands or sports teams I suppose.
The cars themselves seem ok enough to me. I can appreciate what an EV brings to making a car "fun", but its very hard for me to find any car particularly exciting or interesting to be honest so they don't really do anything to move me but as long as the people that do own them are happy what do I care? I suspect they feel much the same way about my mode of travel.
I know little/nothing about Japanese politics. How exactly does the Government of Japan apply pressure to a public company to merge with another failing public company?
Structure doesn't matter. Culturally government cooperates with companies through "asking" (or pressuring if you like) as opposed to western approach where companies can (and will) do as they please within law/regulatory frameworks. Opposite works as well - companies can ask government and pretty much expect result.
Most of it stems from collective culture and family values and taken as something quite important.
Fisker was always a scam if you remember back from days of Fisker Karma.
Even better: He escaped by hiding in a music equipment box that was carried onto a private jet
The first is from Netflix:
https://www.netflix.com/title/81227167
The second is from Apple:
https://tv.apple.com/us/show/wanted-the-escape-of-carlos-gho...
Carlos Goshn participated in the Apple documentary.
IMDB is also showing this one:
> Mazda sells an order of magnitude less cars than even newer companies like BYD. Even less than isuzu.
Mazda sold 1.1M cars in 2023[1]. By comparison Nissan sold 2.9M, BYD 2.6M (obviously this is much less than an order of magnitude difference.
> Mazda is a huge outlier in manfacturing because they are small, but have motorsports calibre/history (meaning they have a history of homologating sports cars.)
Plenty of manufactures have motorsports history. Mazda has a Le Mons win, but apart from that nothing particularly of note. Notably Peugeot and Subaru both have much broader motorsports history and are smaller, and Renault has much much more impressive motorsport pedigree and only sells slightly more cars (1.4M in 2023).
> [Mazda sells an order of magnitude less cars than even newer companies like BYD. Even less than isuzu.] Because of this, they can more tightly control investor expectations, profit/loss. The stock value rarely changes, nevermind grows, so investors are confident in stability and dividends.
This is an argument that is rarely (never?) made, and not born out by the evidence.
Mazda's sales, profit and stock price have all been falling. Their stock price is down from 1700 Yen in 2024 to 1034 Yen today. It's difficult to say "the stock value rarely changes"
> If you invest in mazda, you know you're gonna be able to sell at any point without much worry.
Well if you don't worry about losing money I guess..
[1] https://roadgenius.com/cars/statistics/sales-by-manufacturer...
https://www.automotivedive.com/news/mazda-boosts-us-market-s...
They manufacture a lot in Canada and Mexico, though. I guess we'll find out what current events have in store for them and others.
In Australia, Mazda has been the 2nd highest selling brand (across all models) for a number of years. Not sure about last 18 months.
Last January, I threw Car & Driver stats for 2023 and 2022 best-selling models (from U.S. sales) in a spreadsheet. Mazda was the #12 OEM here, just below Hyundai. (Note this is only based on top 25 models.)
EDIT: Updated to add 2024 top 25.
In 2024, Mazda's CX-5 dropped off the top 25 best-selling, removing it from my spreadsheet.
03. Honda 807,519 11.8%
07. Nissan 398,383 5.8%
In 2023 Mazda increased their volume very slightly, while Nissan lost share, and Honda increased their share.
2023
03. Honda 759,785 11.1%
10. Nissan 271,458 4.0%
12. Mazda 153,808 2.3%
2022
04. Honda 526,699 8.6%
08. Nissan 326,435 5.3%
12. Mazda 151,594 2.5%
(I miss the 2010 Mazda2 I drove in Sydney for a few years, was very fun)
Full disclosure: I'm a Honda driver and was a Toyota driver for many years before that.
They are popular and reliable in the US.
If other people embezzle as well, send them to prison, but there’s no universe in which Ghosn is clean. And there are plenty of big companies ran by people who aren’t so morally bankrupt.
Well, selective justice is a form of injustice. I only have superficial knowledge of the Ghosn saga, but if what the GP alleges is true, then it's not fair to Ghosn that he's prosecuted for something that others get a pass. Of course, I take your point that it's entirely possible to be a bigcorp CEO without fraud and self-dealing.
To scale it down, lots of people drive over the speed limit, which is against the law; but only some people get pulled over and ticketed for it. Many people also observe the speed limit. In the Ghosn analogy, suppose that Japanese drivers got a pass, but foreigners didn't.
Should everyone get pulled over the instant they exceed the speed limit? Do we want to live in such a world? Is it just a matter of scale, the difference between driving a car too fast vs. stealing millions of dollars from your employer?
Really? Why did none of that come through in the court case then? I don't like the norm of giving CEOs valuable benefits instead of cash, but it's undeniably an accepted norm, especially in Japan.
He was convicted for the deferred pension compensation that he had not yet actually received, and for one year, despite the fact pattern being the same every year. The court blatantly made the minimum possible conviction because they knew none of the charges had merit but couldn't possibly acquit him.
It's a box on wheels that gets seven people from point a to point b. The screens help stupify the kids in the back to make the journey quieter for the adults in the front. Nobody is shopping by zero-sixty times, the maintenance intervals are all about the same, and they all fit roughly the same amount of stuff.
The most differentiation you're likely to find is that one or two will fit a sheet of plywood in the back, which is admittedly a pretty fringe thing to differentiate on, and frequently only matters to the second owner who is a tradesperson who doesn't want a full-sized van and doesn't mind a few stains from the kids who used to ride around in the back eating their breakfasts.
Ironically, the Honda Odyssey used to be differentiated by having regular doors in the back instead of sliding doors. They clearly decided that that wasn't an advantageous differentiator, and went to sliding doors after just four years.
I agree. That is why my original thesis was that Hondas are now uninspiring, undifferentiated and boring. Pretty much minivans are all those things, by default.
source: I own a 2017 odyssey, and friend to many other minivan owners
Going from under $350/mo to over $500/mo on a 36-month low mileage lease made what had been an easy decision one way (just get another Rogue) into an easy decision the other way (get a different vehicle from a different manufacturer).
When you venture into the pricing tiers of higher-quality automobiles, you need to be equipped to play in that market. Nissan wasn't, at least in our situation, and it cost them a loyal customer.
For example, the formerly beefcake Landcruiser went from a beastly guzzling v8 in 2021 to a weaker v6 in 2022-2023, and now, in 2024, a weak 2.4L supercharged 4-cyl sipper.
R.I.P. Landcruiser of old, you were an ultimate vehicle in your category.
When they were alive, if I had done what Elon did in front of either of them, that would have been problematic.
I think that's a decent yardstick. The absolute best interpretation is that Elon is someone who does not care if he does things that look like Nazi salutes.
I have relatives who suffered under imperial powers who to this day refuse to buy products made in that country, even though they're objectively good and in some cases the best in the market. I hardly think the trauma of war makes for good judgment, even decades removed.
I think your relatives would be quite justified in boycotting that one product.
You can make your purchasing decisions however you like. Other's don't. Ignoring war trauma makes someone a shit businessperson, at best.
I'm only in my thirties, but I've been hearing this exact (!) sentence, about every single brand, throughout my entire life. Surprisingly, most of the brands are still fine and selling cars.
Toyota doesn't really make money on a Hilux after the first sale though.
Toyota dealers are the worst - their core customer is a like a quiet Tesla fanatic.
The problem Canada created is that it tried to reset it's population graph without ensuring that there was an adequate supply of said basics, and in many instances (housing, food prices) had policies that actively undermined what needed to a happen to support a rapidly expanding population. JT and the other liberal leadership read the Century Initiative and all they took away as "we need 100m people!" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_Initiative)
It's not that a country couldn't theoretically be successful resetting their population graph through immigration, but that they would also have to do things that would cause housing prices to fall or more competition (ie less corporate profits) in the other sectors to absorb the extra demand generated -- 2 things Canada has been absolutely unwilling to do in any meaningful until late last year.
I believe the economic term is population trap, where your society / economy can't expand fast enough to make efficient use of the addition in capital.
It is pretty clear based on the constantly decreasing GDP per capita.
https://population.un.org/wpp/graphs?loc=36&type=Probabilist...
Housing is very expensive, but inflation is largely tamed, unemployment is low, and the government is running surpluses - so things aren't terrible (despite what the Murdoch media say). Birth rates are falling, but I'm not sure how much that really matters given immigration.
They aren’t building because they can’t do it affordably.
My friends in Vancouver had a vacant lot in a prime area and money. They had to wait for three years to be approved to start.
Summary with links to various publications at the end: https://notwokedot.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/The-Behavi...
One problem is that many Canadians move away from those smaller cities because there aren’t jobs that pay well, yet that smaller city isn’t significantly cheaper to live in.
Nobody I meet is from the major Canadian city I live in now. Maybe it’s a fluke, I have only met so many people, or maybe us outsiders just managed to find each other.
Well, duh. See this thread about how this happens: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43026920 when "prophets of parking" are allowed to ruin cities.
I'm talking about cities like Kamloops or Calgary.
Its weird how Toyota had the first mass-market PHEV with the Prius but got hyperfixated on hydrogen cars, and Nissan had one of the most successful BEVs (Leaf 2, maybe even Leaf 1) and just sort-of gave up. I vaguely remember Honda having a decent EV.
I wonder what makes EVs so antithetical to Japanese car companies..
In my opinion this is complete nonsense and after decades very little has happened.
Even for planes I don't think its the future. Just going one step further and making SAF is just a better plan.
With hopefully more trains, and electric planes for many shorter routes.
I'm not sure about your statement here after the wet timing belt inside engine debacle for many European cars engines including Renault that's still existed until today. It's a total disregards of the laws on material physics and chemistry [1], [2].
[1] Wet Belt in Oil Engines: Who Approved This and Why Is It Still Being Made [video]:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SASSFjIt5I
[2] Why So Many People Hate Wet Timing Belts:
https://www.theautopian.com/why-so-many-people-hate-wet-timi...
I disagree with this statement.
The greatest engineer, scientist and inventor of all time, Stanford Ovshinsky, absolutely had no problem excelling in any field he put his mind to.
Ad hominem attacks against fellow posters is very anti-HN.
Organizations OTOH typically develop inertia when it comes to their goals and purpose. Any change takes time to communicate through the organization for one thing. People are conditioned to push the Pavlovian success buttons of the past, for another. Managing budgets, stakeholder expectations, and the disconnect between leadership and the ground level are a whole other class of issues.
So, because the greatest engineer according to your words excels at something. So it's easy for everybody to do the same?
Possibly there was a smarter mechanical engineer than Mr. Ovshinsky, it would be hard for anyone to argue he wasn’t in the top 0.1% in his field(s).
Why a top engineer in the field of making petrol powered cars shouldn’t be able to quickly learn a “new field”, using quotation marks here because electric cars have been around for >100 years, is beyond my understanding.
I find that these companies have something very unique about themselves in terms of culture. And you lose a lot when you try to change it.
For eg. a lot of expats in Tokyo have this attitude that Japanese companies are dim-wits and that they have "westernize" and become English-speaking techbros (Rakuten calls this English-nization).
There might be some things that can be emulated better, but the solution always tends to be a bit too... christian, or rather monotheistic (ie . wipe out everything before and mass replace).
I saw a video the other day where a Ram truck was having issues on the CAN bus after driving 33 miles and would settle down after 10-15 minutes. The tech was pretty much stumped and pretty much only figured it out by brute force. A capacitor on one of the CAN terminators failed making its capacitance higher than spec and screwed up the filtration harmonics after charging for those 33 miles.
There's also two sides to "reliable" where either it's simple to fix or never breaks down. Always keep that in mind whenever someone is talking about reliability because it's never obvious which definition someone has in mind.
* my Ford Focus EV had a very short lead time for parts because it was based on a platform (Focus) shared across many vehicles. Also repair cost was very low for a multi-car accident ($2k).
* Similarly, when common tech is spread across many vehicles (Kia/Hyundai eGMP or GM Ultium) those components are often easier to acquire.
Buying low-volume vehicles or from smaller manufacturers is a recipe for long wait times and expensive repairs. How many Corvettes does GM sell?
Last week, I finally got my second key fob which was absent because of a chip shortage. So even until last year, we were still seeing the effects of the supply chain disruption.
Homeowners still make up the majority of the voter base so they will vote for municipal candidates which prioritize not changing things.
My prediction is that things will inevitably flip when the “have not” group becomes larger than the “have” group, but that might not be for a while as home ownership only became truly unbearable maybe 10-15 years ago.
Another factor is that generational wealth plays a big role in home ownership. The dirty secret is those mid 20s couples down the street did not purchase that house on their own, the either got cosigned by another family member with a hefty down payment gift or they inherited wealth from grandma. There is no estate or gift taxes here so families can perpetuate class transfers forever.
The French have multiple arrest warrants for him due to multiple overlapping fraud and embezzlement cases: https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20230704-second-french...
The BVI found that tens of millions of dollars stored there and the luxury yacht bought with Nissan’s funds and registered to a Shell company owned by Ghosn’s son, actually did belong to Nissan.. and on and on.
Why does anyone give that absolute creep the benefit of the doubt? It didn't come out in the court case because he fled the country before he was tried!
That looks to be one side's claims, and even this one-sided telling acknowledges that he never received any of that money, and that the CFO and finance department signed off on what happened.
> It didn't come out in the court case because he fled the country before he was tried!
He fled the country after being detained and isolated (especially from his wife) for literally years without actually being charged or getting to trial. They were blatantly trying to break him without having to go to the trouble of actually proving a case. And the trial I'm talking about, that convicted him on exactly one count, was held in his absence after he escaped and had no reason to not throw everything at him.
If and when he's convicted in a fair trial under international norms where he gets a fair chance to defend himself, I'll condemn him for that. But until then I'm not going to take the allegations of the people who wanted him gone at face value.
It absolutely doesn't say that.. and it's not a credit to Carlos that many of his schemes to steal tens of millions of dollars in the future were discovered before he could do so.
> In addition to the more than $90 million in undisclosed and unpaid compensation, Ghosn and his subordinates knowingly or recklessly made, or caused to be made, false and misleading statements regarding more than $50 million of additional pension benefits for Ghosn. These included misleading Nissan’s CFO and other Nissan executives regarding the accounting for the additional pension amounts, and creating a false disclosure to support how Nissan accounted for them
[..]
> On or around February 23, 2015, at Ghosn’s direction, Nissan Employee 1 submitted an “Application for Budget Usage” signed by Ghosn, Nissan Employee 1, and Nissan’s CFO, to approve the use of the CEO reserve to book the LTIP awards. Nissan’s CFO was falsely told that the LTIP awards were a broad-based grant to numerous Nissan participants rather than that the vast majority was for Ghosn and included exchange rate protection on the inflated retirement allowance. Relying on this false information, Nissan’s CFO approved and signed off on the LTIP expense request, and the amounts were recorded over three fiscal years. Nissan’s CFO would not have approved booking the LTIP expense without additional disclosure if he had known the truth about its actual intended use.
The board approved Ghosn to create a subsidary to invest in new technologies and instead he spent over $20M on houses for himself in Rio and Beirut...
I literally can't believe people defend this level of corruption. He didn't spend "years" in jail awaiting trial, it was 3 months after the first arrest, another month after the second and then he fled the country within a year of his first arrest [the Japanese kept him in jail for those first 3 months because for some reason they thought he was a flight risk!)
IMHO post communist countries after they got their shit together is closer analogy. They all had their infrastructure built, they had a well educated population and the problem was and its still is that there are not many young people to look after the aging population.
If the government decides to get more serious about this stuff, there will be firsts! There will be people who "got away with it"! It's never applied perfectly evenly. You gotta start somewhere.
Of course the way he was thrown around, when they could have impounded a bunch of his assets and just restricted his movements... the police have their ways of doing things and restriction of speech in particular to avoid coverups is probably a huge chunk of their motivations.
Ghosn isn't the first executive in Japan to ever be arrested. But maybe the police felt the stakes were too high. During the Livedoor scandal, Horie had to post a 300 million yen bond for his temporary freedom, and that was for an "internet company". How much would Ghosn's bond need to be in comparison? Not saying that this is the right way to go about things, but it feels at least consistent.
Sure. But if that "somewhere" just happens to be the literal 1 foreigner among literally hundreds of CEOs doing the same thing, there will naturally be raised eyebrows.
In places with speed cameras, that is exactly what happens. There’s no better way to find an unjust law than to enforce it evenly.
And scale is very important! In your analogy, many CEOs are speeding, some driving 5mph over, some 10mph, but Carlos was tripling the speed limit and then sawed through the bars of the courthouse before he saw trial. It’s insane to me that people are defending it. If you don’t want to be selectively prosecuted for massively embezzling company funds - don’t embezzle company funds..
He had secretly bought himself a 140ft yacht with stolen company funds!
https://img.20mn.fr/FofgQudYQhKtDOGwCHCuRyk/1444x920_un-cust...
Hydrogen is very impractical. Leaks easely and the pressure involved is scary. It is no surprise that good alternatives more or less scrapped the whole thing.
Currently, most hydrogen is produced from fossil fuels, specifically natural gas. Electricity—from the grid or from renewable sources such as wind, solar, geothermal, or biomass—is also currently used to produce hydrogen. In the longer term, solar energy and biomass can be used more directly to generate hydrogen.
(Noting that this is hydrogen for vehicles; hydrogen in other applications are separate matters that should not be painted with the same broad brush.)
It's weird and misleading to describe money he never received and will never receive as "undisclosed compensation".
> Nissan’s CFO was falsely told that the LTIP awards were a broad-based grant to numerous Nissan participants rather than that the vast majority was for Ghosn and included exchange rate protection on the inflated retirement allowance. Relying on this false information, Nissan’s CFO approved and signed off on the LTIP expense request, and the amounts were recorded over three fiscal years. Nissan’s CFO would not have approved booking the LTIP expense without additional disclosure if he had known the truth about its actual intended use.
Right, that's the same part I was reading. The CFO is evidently claiming now that he was deceived back then, let's see what the evidence for that looks like.
From the fact that we have all these detailed figures and calculations, it looks to me very much like the CFO, board and finance department were in on the whole thing. This isn't him secretly taking money out of the vault, it's the company doing accounting tricks to pay him in a way that's more tax-efficient and then flipping it into saying he was stealing from them when they decide to get rid of him.
That's literally just basic accounting. If you are required to report all compensation someone earns and they get $100k salary, $100k bonus, and you put $800k into a retirement account with their name on it - you can't say they only made $200k last year. They only reason he will never receive this undisclosed compensation is because the plot and the blatant illegality was discovered.
And lol, of course his is using the pilfered funds to setup his son in Silicon Valley where he worked for Joe Lonsdale.
And yet the vast majority of large Japanese corporations do exactly that, and the Japanese court acquitted him on that exact fact pattern for all but one of the years they examined.
(A high conviction rate at trial in Japan is merely due to not having a right-to-silence, imprisonment till trial, prosecutors discretionarily dropping some cases.)
Most of the stereotypes of the Japanese justice system are outdated, and it's pretty funny to hear one of the wealthiest people in the world claim he wouldn't get a fair trial there while he was walking free with unrestricted access to his lawyers after numerous arrests for serious financial crimes.
It is not stereotype but simple fact to state that Ghosn was held for questioning for a ridiculously long time by Western standards: 129 days over two periods in the Tokyo Detention House, of which 53 before indictment. Eight hours a day questioning, with no defense lawyer allowed to be present. You might somehow incriminate yourself if that was done to you too.
Ghosn was absolutely a special case: it was extremely plausible that he wouldn't get a fair trial there, as he was the highest-profile (non-Asian) foreigner in Japanese industry, with saturation international media coverage, and moreover there was major protectionism within the two car companies against operationally merging with Renault and actually having plant closings and major layoffs in one of Japan's most sacred industries, which also reportedly incurred high-level opposition from government. (This is not commenting on the specifics of Ghosn's financial case.)
And again, the fact that few high-profile white-collar cases go to trial but end in a plea (which you say is a virtue of the Japanese system) makes it hard to predict what might have happened, both evidence admissibility, verdict and sentence. Certainly unlikely he would have gotten a suspended sentence, if convicted.
UPDATE: Japan’s prosecutor reportedly repeatedly broke the law by leaking details of the case against Ghosn. Which pretty much corroborates both "wouldn't have gotten a fair trial" and "high-level political opposition".
UPDATE 2: RP was one of a handful of Nissan insiders who knew about the planned arrests beforehand: "I was called into Hari Nada's office…and told there was going to be a dramatic arrest. Arranged for maximum publicity... When you lie to someone, to get them back into a particular jurisdiction, so that you can have them arrested in a very public manner, that says a lot about what's going on." [0]