At this point I feel like a rising stock price after a crisis should be a major red flag for long term corporate survival.
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.
thuddrff567gg 15 hours ago [-]
This seems to be the classic way in which management types destroy technical companies. Same thing happened a decade back in electronics companies in Japan (Sony comes to mind).
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.
ty6853 11 hours ago [-]
Ghosn was trained as an engineer at École des Mines de Paris after a humble background in the 3rd world including continual sickness from unsanitary waterwater. He worked from the bottom up in R&D at Michelin and did the impossible turning it around during hyperinflation period in Brazil.
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.
hmmm-i-wonder 13 minutes ago [-]
A genius at some things certainly. I don't know enough to judge his early successes but his more recent ones seem to have a theme of constant consolidation and mergers with clear short term benefits but medium and long term shaky outcomes. Then again that's the trend of all markets the last few decades.
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.
namdnay 8 hours ago [-]
He actually did X-Mines, (École polytechnique then detached to Mines), which means he was in the dozen top science students of his year in France
germinalphrase 10 hours ago [-]
“Even his escape from Japan was just stunningly executed and the perfect selection of professionals with technical competence to pull it off.”
I’m only generally aware of the series of events here. Any good write ups?
MotorTrend's "The InEVitable" podcast has an episode with the WSJ guy that is a lot longer and while less information-dense, it is more colorful and still gets the story across pretty comprehensively.
Can highly recommend the Apple series, was a great documentary.
csomar 2 hours ago [-]
There is a good netflix series about it.
raverbashing 6 hours ago [-]
He's certainly known for thinking outside the box. (but not always ;) )
unyttigfjelltol 24 minutes ago [-]
> Technical competence is generally very hard to judge
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.
alexey-salmin 14 hours ago [-]
I don't know, the Renault Logan (and the B platform in general) was extremely good from the engineering standpoint. Cheap, reliable, easy to maintain, easy to fix. The technical competence in building gasoline cars was definitely there.
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.
namdnay 8 hours ago [-]
M not sure you can even say they missed the electric wave - the Zoe and Leaf were some of the earliest mass market electric cars
jorvi 3 hours ago [-]
The Leaf 2 was and is a very good EV for its price point.
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..
panick21_ 2 hours ago [-]
All of Japan got obsessed with they whole 'hydrogen economy' nonsense. This was just the generally agree on 'future' of the economy.
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.
rightbyte 17 minutes ago [-]
At the time hydrogen was not nonsense. Good lithium batteries happened.
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.
pfdietz 9 minutes ago [-]
And expensive, which is the real killer.
(Noting that this is hydrogen for vehicles; hydrogen in other applications are separate matters that should not be painted with the same broad brush.)
teleforce 11 hours ago [-]
> The technical competence in building gasoline cars was definitely there
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]:
While all true people also do not service their cars and these must be serviced on a regular interval with non standard components. Still a stupid design though which should never have been out into production. Glad my car has a chain, even had one in the past with a wonky guide which made lots of noise but worked until the end without issues (write-off was not engine related but purely economical, expensive tires brakes etc).
Gud 8 hours ago [-]
>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.
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.
mashepp 6 hours ago [-]
> The greatest engineer, scientist and inventor of all time, Stanford Ovshinsky, absolutely had no problem excelling in any field he put his mind to.
So, because the greatest engineer according to your words excels at something. So it's easy for everybody to do the same?
Gud 5 hours ago [-]
”the most competent”.
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.
idiotsecant 36 minutes ago [-]
Do you think individual technical contribution is the hardest part of retooling an entire industrial supply chain? Making a car is easy.
thechao 8 minutes ago [-]
As per "Gung Ho", starring ~Batman~ Michael Keaton.
darkerside 44 minutes ago [-]
It's incontrovertibly true at the organizational level, not necessarily the personal. Individuals can be polymaths, and I would posit that success in one domain can actually predict success in others.
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.
paganel 6 hours ago [-]
Just saw a social media post of a guy here from Romania going with his first generation Logan all the way to Eastern Siberia / Mongolia. Great cars.
thuddrff567gg 8 hours ago [-]
I don't mean to claim that Renault is technically incompetent (obv. that's false).
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).
makeitdouble 5 hours ago [-]
Could you expend on the parrallel you see with Sony ?
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.
m463 14 hours ago [-]
I kind of wonder if the endgame for all of this is one-product-per-company.
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.
mikepurvis 13 hours ago [-]
That seems like the current model in tech, to the point that companies are eventually renamed for their only product (RIM -> BlackBerry, Sun -> JAVA, dotCloud -> Docker), but there are also a few Asian megacorps that have their fingers in seemingly everything, think of Yamaha and Mitsubishi.
wilsynet 11 hours ago [-]
I do not recall Sun being renamed into “Java”. It was acquired by Oracle as Sun Microsystems.
devchix 7 minutes ago [-]
Sun changed its stock ticker from SUNW to JAVA. It never mattered for a dying company. Solaris packages were named SUNWxxxx, and was never renamed.
pnp 9 hours ago [-]
Correct, I recall the stock ticker symbol was renamed to JAVA, but not the company.
mikepurvis 2 hours ago [-]
Yes I should have clarified that that was stock ticker (or found another actual example).
achenet 3 hours ago [-]
to my knowledge, Sun never actually made money off of Java, their main source of revenue was always selling hardware (indeed, one of the reasons Oracle bought them out was because Oracle was one of the biggest consumers of Sun's hardware).
Mistletoe 13 hours ago [-]
Wouldn’t you say this is what the current ruling party of the government is doing to the USA? Seems eerily the same to me.
orwin 20 hours ago [-]
Under Goshn and his close early advisors, Renault-Nissan started working on EVs, launching the Leaf and Zoé. Early, he also managed to streamline production of the two companies, and started to implement management changes that let some workers have more autonomy.
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.
csours 19 hours ago [-]
> My personal theory is that the fallout from his divorce ...
Yes, I've noticed that people having nasty public fights with family members can lead to extremely negative effects on decision making.
jillesvangurp 6 hours ago [-]
He's definitely narcissistic. But that doesn't make him wrong. It suited the Japanese board very well to paint him as corrupt and get rid of him. Nissan's performance after that took a decidedly downward trajectory. Which is why the merger with Honda became a kind of hail-Mary strategy recently.
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.
> He's definitely narcissistic. But that doesn't make him wrong.
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).
rr808 11 hours ago [-]
BYD is unique because it can leverage the Chinese government's push into EVs along with the lax environmental regulation giving cheap batteries & other components. I dont think anyone can compete with Chinese car makers.
adrian_b 3 hours ago [-]
I believe that this thesis supported by many Americans, that the Chinese companies are too strong competitors for the US companies only due to governmental subsidies and lax environmental regulation is an extremely dangerous illusion.
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.
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)
bildung 2 hours ago [-]
EU car manufacturers are also heavily subsidized. Subsidies are really hard do compare because you can structure them very differently and still achieve similar results (think direct loans or land leases, lower taxes, state sponsored infrastructure like rail, electricity, water, large state-sponsored orders, research grants, workforce education, consumer grants for EV vehicles, lower taxes for EV vehicles etc.).
If that is true, BYD actually gets about the same as VW.
spacebanana7 4 hours ago [-]
Hyundai and Kia still manage to make fairly competitive EVs. Having an established dealer, customer and maintenance networks can mitigate those BYD advantages.
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.
kridsdale1 15 hours ago [-]
Boy, that final paragraph sure looks like another automaker CEO…
namdnay 8 hours ago [-]
No he was clearly always an asshole (but I agree he clearly had some genius)
sfifs 15 hours ago [-]
> and idiotic sycophants made him believe he was above the law and deserved even more
Well in all fairness he is above the law. He walked out of Japan and is free in his country.
vosper 14 hours ago [-]
> He walked out of Japan
Even better: He escaped by hiding in a music equipment box that was carried onto a private jet
There was a famous Dutch philosopher who managed to piss of the government and escaped from a castle that way (minus the private jet) in the 17th century. His wife was allowed to bring him books and he used the box to escape. He went to Paris and never got extradited either.
lmm 13 hours ago [-]
His prosecution was blatantly motivated (the CEO who replaced him has far bigger embezzleme^H^Hfinancial irregularities that no-one cares to charge him for). I doubt people would have been so eager to help him escape if he had actually broken the law rather than being charged for running a big company while foreign.
mikeyouse 12 hours ago [-]
He had enriched himself to the tune of tens of millions of company dollars completely undisclosed to the firm.. he had multiple mansions, yachts, and “CEO Reserve” bank accounts that the BoD wasn’t aware of. The men who were “so eager” to help him escape were paid upwards of $1M to do so… man I’m getting tired of people justifying ludicrous amounts of graft and theft.
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.
gottorf 12 hours ago [-]
> If other people embezzle as well, send them to prison, but there’s no universe in which Ghosn is clean.
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?
rtpg 10 hours ago [-]
There are plenty of criciticisms about the means by which he was prosecuted but "others get a pass but he doesn't" is not a great way of thinking about this.
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.
lmm 10 hours ago [-]
> 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.
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.
mikeyouse 11 hours ago [-]
> Should everyone get pulled over the instant they exceed the speed limit?
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!
I don't care if he raped 12 nuns, he was unable to get a fair trial so his escape was just. Japan's justice system is a farcical.
mikeyouse 10 hours ago [-]
Protip - you should care if he raped 12 nuns! Japan's justice system, while certainly has issues is universally considered to be one of the worlds' fairest. Their high conviction rate is solely due to taking so few cases to judgement as most plead out.
lmm 11 hours ago [-]
> He had enriched himself to the tune of tens of millions of company dollars completely undisclosed to the firm.. he had multiple mansions, yachts, and “CEO Reserve” bank accounts that the BoD wasn’t aware of.
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.
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.
mikeyouse 10 hours ago [-]
> 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 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!)
lmm 10 hours ago [-]
> 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.
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.
mikeyouse 10 hours ago [-]
> It's weird and misleading to describe money he never received and will never receive as "undisclosed compensation".
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.
> 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.
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.
mikeyouse 8 hours ago [-]
You keep referring to a court case but I think you’re talking about Kelly’s? Ghosn has never had a trial in Japan, so he hasn’t been acquitted (or convicted) of anything. Even if the pension deceit was somehow above board, there’s still the inconvenient 140ft yacht unknowingly paid for with Nissan funds and registered to Ghosn’s son’s shell company parked in a bay near Beirut that multiple different courts have found was illegally obtained..
BonoboIO 10 hours ago [-]
As much as i think, that he would never have gotten a fair trial … he did not even pay his escape helpers.
timewizard 19 hours ago [-]
> At this point I feel like a rising stock price after a crisis should be a major red flag for long term corporate survival.
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.
decimalenough 8 hours ago [-]
> critical to the company's EV strategy
TIL that Nissan has an EV strategy, other than "build the world's first mass-market EV (Leaf), then ignore it for a decade".
Etheryte 4 hours ago [-]
I think this really underlines the lack of clear leadership and vision. They were already headed the right way, all they had to do was keep going.
pmg101 4 hours ago [-]
I mean... A more accurate description might be, "They had already taken one step in the right direction, 15 years ago, all they had to do was make any further steps in this direction any time since then!"
cjrp 3 hours ago [-]
I was surprised to see a very popular model here (Qashqai) doesn’t have a full EV version yet, only hybrid.
uxp100 6 minutes ago [-]
The leaf and the Qashqi are pretty similar.
bearjaws 21 hours ago [-]
IMO a Honda Nissan merger would have been terrible for Honda.
Nissan is clearly an anchor, and acquiring it would have just dragged Honda down .
VectorLock 20 hours ago [-]
Its too bad since Honda has seemed to have totally lost its luster the past decade or so. Honda was Apple to Toyota's Microsoft for a long time, now their cars are bland and undifferentiated, rather than the innovative leaders they used to be.
JohnBooty 1 hours ago [-]
From my consumer's perspective: amen. At least in the US they were always "like Toyota, but a bit more fun."
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)
matthewdgreen 12 hours ago [-]
I have a Prologue, which is a wonderful EV. Unfortunately it’s manufactured by GM because Honda has been asleep at the wheel regarding EVs. They need to wake up and fast.
protocolture 13 hours ago [-]
Still pissed they removed the Jazz from the australian market. It was honestly my definition of perfect small car for 10 years.
acomjean 10 hours ago [-]
The end of the honda element makes me grumpy too.
JamesSwift 14 hours ago [-]
Uhh, the Odyssey is still best of breed for minivans in the price segment.
VectorLock 8 hours ago [-]
Yet still bland and undifferentiated and a minivan.
mauvehaus 54 minutes ago [-]
I'm not personally convinced that minivans lend themselves to much differentiation. They all hold about seven people, and more dollars gets you more screens.
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.
kwiens 5 minutes ago [-]
The Toyota Sienna is the only minivan with all-wheel drive, which matters in cold climates or for the more adventerous families. It's built on the same chassis as the Highlander.
killerpopiller 16 hours ago [-]
habe you seen the Honda e?
robin_reala 16 minutes ago [-]
I would have bought one had it even had a 50kwh battery, but 35kwh made it just dead in the water to me unfortunately.
Its cute but not particularly exciting in my opinion, what do you think?
thedrbrian 1 hours ago [-]
and it's not a tenth as good looking as the concept
Grazester 21 hours ago [-]
Funny that's what those Nissan CVT's and variable compression engines are only good for, anchors.
red-iron-pine 17 hours ago [-]
nah they're far too freakin fragile to be anchors, given how regularly they shatter or break
olyjohn 16 hours ago [-]
I could not understand why this merger was happening. What possible benefit was there for Honda to take on Nissan's cruft?
thuddrff567gg 15 hours ago [-]
I don't know. I thought they could benefit from Nissan's EVs - the thing they have going with Sony is too expensive to be able to work ($90K for the base model eek!).
AcerbicZero 15 hours ago [-]
I haven't been following this closely, but what was the appeal for Honda? I mean, Nissan has a few cars that are moving in OK numbers these days but I don't see many routes for a return to form over the long run; Commodity cars are a dying breed.
somerandomqaguy 15 hours ago [-]
Rumour mill is that the Japanese government was pressuring Honda to merge with Nissan to save Nissan. During a press conference the CEO of Honda Toshihiro Mibe couldn't articulate a reason justifying the merger.
Pretty much this. Honda was all but begged by the Japanese government to bail Nissan out. Remember that the Japanese government had a role in taking out Renault and preventing a French takeover of Nissan, their political hand was already overstretched.
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.
teruakohatu 11 hours ago [-]
> Pretty much this. Honda was all but begged by the Japanese government to bail Nissan out. Remember that the Japanese government had a role in taking out Renault and preventing a French takeover of Nissan, their political hand was already overstretched.
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?
jac_no_k 8 hours ago [-]
I would imagine by implying that if Honda doesn't cooperate, they would face increased regulatory scrutiny. IE, Honda factories needs to have more safety inspections, vehicles fails to pass emissions tests, a finding that requires huge recalls, etc.
jesterson 6 hours ago [-]
> 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.
namdnay 8 hours ago [-]
The last time the boss of Nissan didn’t do what they wanted, they put him in prison
WeylandYutani 11 hours ago [-]
US Steel is in such a bad shape that Trump has to put a tariff to save them. At least foreign cars can still be sold in Japan.
dghlsakjg 15 hours ago [-]
> Commodity cars are a dying breed.
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.
1-more 14 hours ago [-]
You read about the sub like $20K EVs in China and you think "maybe we're due to get belt and roaded here."
poglet 15 hours ago [-]
Was surprised how popular there are, also self driving taxis in Wuhan and other places.
bobthepanda 15 hours ago [-]
there's a lot of incentives pushing people into EVs. For example, to limit pollution and congestion it often takes winning a lottery to get a car registration for ICE, but that's generally much laxer if not completely gone for EVs.
In Shanghai at one point the cost of a ICE vehicle registration cost more than a low end EV.
seanmcdirmid 13 hours ago [-]
Beijing has a lottery for plates instead, except the allocation for EVs is separate from ICEs, so it is much easily to get an EV. Back in 2016, you started seeing Model S’s driving around Beijing, and those were definitely imported with something like a 20-30% tax (at least), but the only alternative was no luxury car (like the famous black Audi that used to be super common), so they just started showing up.
Mistletoe 12 hours ago [-]
I still wouldn't want a Nissan commodity car. My family has owned a few and even Infinitis and it didn't turn out well compared to all the Toyotas that are still in the family. The G35 was a great car, but those days are gone.
a2tech 15 hours ago [-]
Nissan has a following in the work vehicle category and is well established especially outside the us. They’re not nothing.
Companies are so much more than the consumer experience.
alephnerd 20 hours ago [-]
While this is HN so any automotive conversation inevitabely becomes an ideological war between EV vs ICE fanatics, this didn't play as significant a role in the failure of Nissan and Honda's merger.
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.
jillesvangurp 5 hours ago [-]
I think it's more realists vs. at this point the clearly losing ICE proponent side. The EV market grows double digit percentages every year. Mostly at the cost of the ICE car market. Even last year when lots of the ICE manufacturers insisted the EV market was 'shrinking' (no such thing happened), the EV market actually expanded by about 20% globally. And since the overall car market did not grow by such numbers, guess where all that growth went: not them.
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.
protocolture 13 hours ago [-]
>While this is HN so any automotive conversation inevitabely becomes an ideological war between EV vs ICE fanatics, this didn't play as significant a role in the failure of Nissan and Honda's merger.
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.
Apocryphon 19 hours ago [-]
What about Mazda?
alephnerd 16 hours ago [-]
US.
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.
Reubachi 19 hours ago [-]
TLDR; Mazda should merge with Nissan while they still can do it on a fire sale.
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.
nl 13 hours ago [-]
This is an odd comment.
> 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..
That's been my impression, interesting to see it confirmed. They are very well represented on the roads here in SoCal.
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.
phs318u 13 hours ago [-]
> Mazda sells an order of magnitude less cars than even newer companies like BYD.
In Australia, Mazda has been the 2nd highest selling brand (across all models) for a number of years. Not sure about last 18 months.
neogodless 30 minutes ago [-]
I think U.S.-centric readers may misunderstand Mazda. When I was in Singapore, I saw one example of them being quite popular abroad. In the U.S., they seem to be more of an enthusiast / novelty brand.
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%
justahuman74 8 hours ago [-]
Australia is a small market though, so being second there might not help a lot.
(I miss the 2010 Mazda2 I drove in Sydney for a few years, was very fun)
phs318u 8 hours ago [-]
Wow. I just checked out a few random other markets including Japan, and it's crazy to me that Mazda isn't doing better. They've got some really nice cars. It's bizarre. I wonder if this is by design or they just can't market for shit?
Full disclosure: I'm a Honda driver and was a Toyota driver for many years before that.
zenlot 17 hours ago [-]
You got it all wrong on Mazda. It's your opinion, but not publics and they're doing damn well now, especially with their great recent SUVs.
unethical_ban 7 hours ago [-]
They have a district brand identity of it doesn't look like shit and they have physical controls for their console.
They are popular and reliable in the US.
ggm 8 hours ago [-]
How did VAG succeed? Because it's the same problems: culture fit, market fit. Nissan kept but focused on e.g. light industrial vehicles, ATVs and military while Honda plays at being Sony/Apple for cars? That could have worked.
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.
alecco 20 hours ago [-]
Japanese carmakers are going to become irrelevant [1] unless there's a major change. But that's very unlikely due to:
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
I don't understand what point you're trying to make with your source. A relatively new company in the Japanese market (BYD) has increased sales in its specialized niche of EVs, beating out a minor competitor that sells only one model of EV as an option to it's brand loyal customers (Toyota, BZ4X). Meanwhile, the EV market as a whole has declined significantly in Japan over the last year.
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
tjpnz 12 hours ago [-]
I live in Tokyo and have never seen a BYD in the wild.
onlypassingthru 20 hours ago [-]
Irrelevant to whom? Toyota, Honda and Subaru all have lifelong customers and for good reason. The cars often last for 20+ years with minimal upkeep.
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.
All cars last 20+yr if you give a crap unless they have some fundamental engineering or execution Achilles heel (ecoboost water pump, Toyota frame rust, Hyundai engine problems, etc) that will manifest as a comically not-economical repair when the vehicle is old enough in age to be of fairly low value.
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.
Zardoz84 15 hours ago [-]
I have a Nissan Micra from 1998, working fine. Great little car. I inherited from my grandfather.
ehnto 8 hours ago [-]
I have driven nothing but pre-2008 Nissans for about 20 years.
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.
crowcroft 14 hours ago [-]
New car purchasing behaviour follows the law of double jeopardy. ie. Toyota has high repeat purchase rates because it has high market share, not because of loyal customers.
protocolture 13 hours ago [-]
At least until the last 10 years people would try and sell Toyota on safety and reliability. People who wanted to extract every cent out of the cars life would get a toyota because it would legit go the distance without failure. Dealer told me that it doesnt hold true anymore due to electronics. But old corollas are still legendarily reliable first cars for teenagers. And I recall the used market for old hiluxes is beyond belief.
Toutouxc 15 minutes ago [-]
> it doesnt hold true anymore due to electronics
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.
crowcroft 12 hours ago [-]
Second hard markets for second hand cars a little bit different, reliable cars end up having higher loyalty through selection bias since they simply exist longer though.
Toyota doesn't really make money on a Hilux after the first sale though.
protocolture 8 hours ago [-]
True, but they sell fleets on that (now out of date) understanding of reliability.
onlypassingthru 13 hours ago [-]
In my experience it has more to do with quality and affordability. If you like your Toyota Camry, you're probably going to get another Camry. Subarus are slightly different in that they have cornered a niche (snowy mountain driving) that many owners swear by.
Spooky23 12 hours ago [-]
Subaru has the snowy country people and gays down. Nissan used to have the same type of affinity with black customers - when treating alienated customers with respect is a novelty, people demonstrate loyalty.
Spooky23 12 hours ago [-]
No way.
Toyota dealers are the worst - their core customer is a like a quiet Tesla fanatic.
tpm 19 hours ago [-]
They have lifelong customers, but those also don't live forever and can change their opinion, and if the carmakers don't adapt, they won't survive. For the last 19 years we have been buying Toyota, but I'm slowly starting to look for a new car and it has to be an EV and Toyota is currently very underwhelming in that regard in our market.
kridsdale1 15 hours ago [-]
Meanwhile I bought a 2024 Toyota that gets 10mpg and I fucking love it.
Toutouxc 11 minutes ago [-]
I honestly don't understand how anyone can not be ashamed talking about their car getting 10 MPG.
metadat 14 hours ago [-]
Which 2024 Toyota gets 10mpg?
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.
gottorf 12 hours ago [-]
If you drive a new Tundra or 4runner with a lead foot in the city, you're probably going to get 10-ish mpg. Of course, that's just talking about stock vehicles. Plenty of modifications you can do a car to make it less fuel-efficient ;-)
14 hours ago [-]
tpm 6 hours ago [-]
Good for you, not so good for the climate, but we get our oil from Putin and I'd rather not to.
caspper69 15 hours ago [-]
Prime example: we leased 3 Nissans in a row (dipping our toes in with an Altima and then 2 Rogues in a row), so 9 years worth, but prior to the last turn-in, they released a new Rogue that was smaller on the inside (but I believe may have been slightly larger on the outside), sapped the power out of the base engine (our Rogues had some pep in their step), and as the final nail in the coffin, raised prices by 15% or so and lowered the lease residuals- the net effect was a worse automobile with a ~30% higher monthly payment.
Going from under $350/mo to over $500/mo on a 36-month low mileage lease made what had been an easy decision one way (just get another Rogue) into an easy decision the other way (get a different vehicle from a different manufacturer).
When you venture into the pricing tiers of higher-quality automobiles, you need to be equipped to play in that market. Nissan wasn't, at least in our situation, and it cost them a loyal customer.
r00fus 20 hours ago [-]
Amazing you feel that EVs are somehow more maintenance than ICEs. There exist EVs that have never had any manufacturer/dealer input since the day they rolled off the lot.
Tesla/Nio are a bad examples - many EVs were built to be sold and essentially ignored by the manufacturer.
onlypassingthru 19 hours ago [-]
After that EV company goes out of business, how are you going to replace that bespoke {$random_part} that broke? Any Fisker Ocean owners want to chime in?[0]
You don't. You buy from a large vehicle manufacturer like Ford, Kia, etc. where they have commitment to parts delivery for the foreseeable future.
Fisker was always a scam if you remember back from days of Fisker Karma.
olyjohn 16 hours ago [-]
Do the big companies really have a commitment to parts delivery anymore, or are they following the same trend? Took my friend 9 months to get a part for his C8 Corvette when it got rear ended at 5mph. Tons of other GM owners have been waiting months to nearly a year for many common parts for repairs. Selling parts doesn't make these companies money, so why should they care? As long as they're making enough to sell the new cars first.
r00fus 12 hours ago [-]
I will say a couple of things:
* 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?
consp 6 hours ago [-]
Funny thing with Fords is you can pretty much swap parts between models even if they are not officially in the same platform. Lots of overlap. Got a sync unit from a transit for a fiesta, works fine after updating the settings to match the vehicle.
gottorf 12 hours ago [-]
Corvettes are niche cars, with only tens of thousands sold a year. Plus, I don't know when your friend got in that fender bender, but post-Covid supply chain issues meant that anybody in any newer car (with lots of electronics) who got in an accident in the past few years waited a while for parts.
CharlieDigital 2 hours ago [-]
I bought a Prius Prime this time last year.
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.
dkjaudyeqooe 19 hours ago [-]
Never mind the parts, how do you get your firmware updated without being held hostage?
formerly_proven 20 hours ago [-]
There's one graph that basically predicts which countries are going to fail and which are going to prevail. It's the graph that shows how many people in the "doing things" age bracket a country has.
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.
alecco 19 hours ago [-]
It is an important variable. But a more realistic picture needs to factor in:
1. median IQ
2. skills
3. future unfunded liabilities (welfare, pensions, public health, etc)
China has demographics collapse like the West but they have high median IQ, high skills, and almost no unfunded liabilities. Meanwhile, Western IQ and skills are dropping like a stone and they have trillions in unfunded liabilities. And any attempt to fix it is either a drop in a bucket or going to trigger massive unrest. Just see what happened in France a year ago.
I hope China learns this lesson an makes some changes. At least they have a bit more runway to do so.
bobthepanda 15 hours ago [-]
I think this really depends on how you define unfunded liabilities. China, for example, has mostly not established liabilities because the social systems for retiring are a joke. People instead save personally and shovel those savings into real estate, but the real estate market is collapsing/collapsed because it turns out all that retirement saving driving up the median-house to median-income ratio to 40+x was not sustainable.
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.
alecco 5 hours ago [-]
Good point.
petra 20 hours ago [-]
Assuming a decent AI and robotics, is a lot of working age population still a good thing? Or just more mouths to feed?
mrtksn 20 hours ago [-]
What happens when a country fails?
gottorf 12 hours ago [-]
South Africa is a good example of a country that is currently in that trajectory.
mrtksn 10 hours ago [-]
Right, so you expect Germany be like South Africa soon?
gottorf 10 hours ago [-]
I was merely asking your question about what happens when a country fails. I have no expectation of Germany turning out like South Africa.
mrtksn 10 hours ago [-]
Right, I'm trying to find out what people expect to happen when a developed country fails.
numpad0 8 hours ago [-]
Like post WWII Axis nations?
mrtksn 8 hours ago [-]
I don't think its similar because this time those are not war thorn nations, it's just a period of population decline.
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.
denkmoon 16 hours ago [-]
We need only to look to Sudan, Somalia, et al.
mrtksn 10 hours ago [-]
So Japan etc. are about to be like Somalia?
18 hours ago [-]
tokioyoyo 14 hours ago [-]
China still has a good chunk of population in rural area that will keep supporting urban population growth for a while. That being said, I'm not sure how any of those graphs translate to quality of life of an average person living in those countries.
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.
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.
morkalork 20 hours ago [-]
Canada doesn't feel like it's winning despite what the graph says*. Bringing in tons of working-aged immigrants has caused housing (and other living) costs to explode, which in turn has lead to less people having children, which leads to more immigration to fill the gap and the whole thing has been spiraling. Not fun at all.
The problem with just "living by the graph" is that it ignores whether the country has the capacity to provide basics like food, clothing, shelter, and employment to the population. You need to have both to have the working-age population be able to engage productively in the economy.
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.
3vidence 10 hours ago [-]
Yeah there has been a pretty definitive drop in overall productivity in Canada since the sudden increase in population.
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.
gravelc 15 hours ago [-]
Australia is 'winning' even more based on the graph:
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.
thomassmith65 19 hours ago [-]
Immigration is no excuse for the Canadian housing shortage. Canada is one of the world's largest land masses, and - even in its South - mainly uninhabited.
kridsdale1 15 hours ago [-]
They’re over regulated. All the geography and materials in the world.
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.
gottorf 11 hours ago [-]
This seems to be a problem especially concentrated in the Anglosphere. Britain[0], Canada, Australia, and to a lesser degree in the US due to its libertarian streak. I wonder why that's the case?
It's happening in almost every developed country. Everyone introduced similar planning/zoning regimes following the post-WWII rebuilding (possibly as an overcorrection to unpleasant prefab buildings), and 70 years down the line they're paying the price.
greenavocado 20 hours ago [-]
Canada is a Calhounian behavioral sink except they stave off the extinction by importing.
Canada needs to start a campaign to promote smaller cities, rather than concentrating all the people in Toronto and Vancouver.
doubled112 14 hours ago [-]
How small are we talking?
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.
cyberax 9 hours ago [-]
> One problem is that many Canadians move away from those smaller cities because there aren’t jobs that pay well
I'm talking about cities like Kamloops or Calgary.
vpribish 19 hours ago [-]
not often a comment here makes an impact like that. wow - holy crap.
numpad0 19 hours ago [-]
This merger deal was a strange one. Honda CEO on stage wasn't sure why he was there, unnamed Nissan exec reportedly remarked "good riddance" to the deal falling through, ex-Nissan Foxconn exec expressing interest and Foxconn CEO eventually declining through the press, and so on.
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.
adev_ 5 hours ago [-]
The Carlos Ghosn story is really one of the biggest cliffhanger in automotive history.
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.
Renault's ICE engines are also known to be extremely reliable amongst central and southern europe's taxi drivers (who put insane mileage on them). Unlike other French marques - Peugeot and Citroen - who are in the "stay away" category amongst people who drive 40,000+ km/year
adev_ 5 hours ago [-]
> Renault's ICE engines are also known to be extremely reliable amongst central and southern europe's taxi drivers (who put insane mileage on them). Unlike other French marques - Peugeot and Citroen - who are in the "stay away" category amongst people who drive 40,000+ km/year
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.
forgotoldacc 5 hours ago [-]
> They completely miss the electrification
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.
makeitdouble 4 hours ago [-]
> It makes no sense.
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)
adev_ 5 hours ago [-]
> 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 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.
momo_hn2025 4 hours ago [-]
any source or link to the specific regulation? in know localized data storage, cross-border assessments is a must, but don't know souce code is a must.
adev_ 4 hours ago [-]
> any source or link to the specific regulation? in know localized data storage, cross-border assessments is a must
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.
taurknaut 3 hours ago [-]
> cheats
All i see is competition. Companies cheat by relying on ip to begin with and it hurts the consumer.
farseer 5 hours ago [-]
Toyota has plug in hybrids from which I am guessing they would remove the ICE when they feel necessary. The rest of Japanese automakers might not make it. You have to understand that America has practically banned Chinese cars from entering the market and ICE is still big going forward in America.
tahoeskibum 21 hours ago [-]
Nissan, Honda & eventually Toyota are going to go the way of Nokia/Motorola after iPhone came out. Cheap and reliable Chinese EVs will take over the market (like Android), while Tesla will probably maintain a halo premium product like iPhone.
mongol 21 hours ago [-]
Tesla is going down the drain, at least in Europe, unless shareholders evict Musk. Nothing iPhone-like with that brand anymore.
Out of curiosity, do you know anyone on the political right who feels that way?
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.
rapsey 20 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
mongol 17 hours ago [-]
I live here. This sentiment is everywhere
Tagbert 19 hours ago [-]
that has changed drastically recently. Big drops in sales in EU.
r00fus 19 hours ago [-]
Other EV manufacturers are essentially picking up the lost sales and the EV market as a whole is up marginally.
And have other EV makers seen more success or have they all had declines?
nl 13 hours ago [-]
> And have other EV makers seen more success or have they all had declines?
Others have seen big increases.
> Tesla almost 60% fewer cars in Germany in January than in the year-earlier period... The overall segment of battery-electric vehicles, where Tesla is competing, however, gained popularity in January, with sales up 53.5% at almost 34,500 vehicles across all brands.
> A total of 405 new Teslas were registered in Sweden last month, down 44% from January 2024, while registrations in Norway fell to 689, a decline of 38% over the same period, despite soaring overall demand for cars in the two countries.
I tried to find individual manufacturer numbers but couldn't. I did find this:
> Global sales of fully electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids (PHEV) rose 17.7% year on year to 1.3 million in January, the third consecutive month of slowing growth, the Rho Motion data showed.
> Europe reported sales of 0.25 million, up 21% from the same month of 2024.
Tesla has great battery and motor tech. Their quality control and car interiors leave a lot to be desired.
silon42 2 hours ago [-]
The interior (and exterior) misfeatures is why wouldn't buy a Tesla... also, I'd prefer a slightly smaller car.
heyjamesknight 20 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
AlotOfReading 20 hours ago [-]
It's wild how different experiences can be. I've had some shitboxes in my day. One car had an air intake that would fall off, so you'd occasionally have to keep the RPMs above 2k or it would stall. One car was a 1970s Russian van held together with duct tape and prayers. The door fell off while driving one day, so I wired it back on with roadside scrap and kept going.
The newish old model 3 I had for a few weeks during a backordered warranty repair was worse than either of them. The charging cable would get stuck. Sometimes the doors wouldn't open and I'd have to reboot the car. The headliner glue failed and dumped the roof on my head. You couldn't see through the rear window if it was raining too hard. Sentry mode would take 8-10% of the battery overnight. Many features simply didn't work without the cellular plan.
WillPostForFood 19 hours ago [-]
You couldn't see through the rear window if it was raining too hard.
You think there was a glass defect? or was it just wet?
AlotOfReading 19 hours ago [-]
If there's too much rain, the water sheets off the low slope and makes it impossible to see. It needed fairly heavy rain for this to happen, but not so much that I felt uncomfortable driving (sans rear visibility issue).
mperham 20 hours ago [-]
The quality doesn't matter if consumers aren't willing to step into the showroom. YoY sales are cratering, down 50% (!!!) in Europe. That's catastrophic for a "quality product".
user3939382 20 hours ago [-]
This sounds like political venting more than a financial analysis.
margalabargala 20 hours ago [-]
The parent specified in Europe. It's a fact that in January 2025, European Tesla sales have had significant YoY declines, attributed to Musk's political activity. A greater than 50% drop in sales in France and Germany, for example.
Tesla gained a reputation of being the best EVs around, by virtue of being essentially the only company making EVs able to truly replace a gas car for close to a decade. It's easy to be the best in a category with just one competitor.
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.
KerrAvon 14 hours ago [-]
Lucid has a viable Model S competitor. I haven't driven one, but they're very well-reviewed and they beat the Model S specs for range.
margalabargala 13 hours ago [-]
Interesting, it looks like they've dropped their prices a lot since the last time I checked. You're right.
gottorf 11 hours ago [-]
> their CEO throws Nazi salutes at political rallies
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.
margalabargala 10 hours ago [-]
Both my grandfathers fought in Europe in WWII.
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.
gottorf 10 hours ago [-]
> I think that's a decent yardstick
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.
solatic 20 hours ago [-]
Honda is bigger than just automobiles, they also hold the lion's share of the two-wheeler market (motorcycles, scooters). They're a far way from dead.
holtkam2 17 hours ago [-]
Honest question: are there people who know about Lucid and don’t consider them nicer cars than Teslas?
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
eftpotrm 5 hours ago [-]
All Tesla's global sales cars are due for replacement, and none are in the offing. Tesla are circling the drain, fast, and are very unlikely to be around in their current form in 5-10 years time - the replacement product they'd need to survive takes too long to develop and should have already started, but hasn't. Best case for them IMHO is that someone spots a key asset they own (IMHO most likely the supercharger network) and buys them for that, but the stock price is currently wildly overinflated which prevents it. One day, that bubble will burst.
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.
odiroot 10 hours ago [-]
Honda will be fine. They own the motorcycle market, especially in Asia.
junaru 5 hours ago [-]
Noone is excited about hondas, its all about Chinese bikes - cfmotos, koves, etc.
llm_nerd 20 hours ago [-]
I have huge doubts that Teslas will retain a "halo premium", except in some very strange circles. Already they're an embarrassing car to own and the financials of that company are rapidly flushing down the toilet, making it a question of how long it will be a going concern (hence all the frantic rushing around for legitimacy in other markets...robots, why not?)
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").
silisili 18 hours ago [-]
> Already they're an embarrassing car to own
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.
protocolture 13 hours ago [-]
I didnt have an opinion of them until I sat in one. I hated the interior. Its very much like silicon valley trying to reinvent things that work. People compare it to an iPhone but its like sitting in the Windows 11 start menu. The entire design language of car interiors built up over decades thrown away for no reason.
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.
7speter 10 hours ago [-]
I took a Tesla cab (the crossover SUV). I don't see how you can describe the interior as anything remotely utilitarian (even the Windows start menu is, even if you don't like Windows); the thing was barren other than the tablet for a console in the front. I understand that might be the entry level version, but you can get a lot more car interior for the price from other makers.
protocolture 8 hours ago [-]
Yeah lots of room thats true.
llm_nerd 18 hours ago [-]
Did people really hate Tesla drivers? Aside from an extremely niche "rolling coal" sort, they were just a car. An innovative car that had downsides, but also had big upsides like insane torque and big screens (which were odd at the time, but pretty normal now). They were neat to tech sorts.
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.
theshackleford 12 hours ago [-]
> Five or more years ago, people hated Tesla drivers, either because they represented wealth or that they were seen as progressive 'tree huggers'.
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.
jgon 20 hours ago [-]
So your prediction is that chinese EVs manage to take over and destroy the Japanese car market, but the American auto market somehow gets a pass and Tesla wins? Why would Tesla be any more able to withstand cars that cost like 1/2 for similar quality, and why wouldn't that same calculus apply to their "halo" products? Are the Chinese fundamentally incapable of building a luxury EV? And if Tesla somehow sees that an EV halo product is their only chance for survival, 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?
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.
lmm 12 hours ago [-]
> Why would Tesla be any more able to withstand cars that cost like 1/2 for similar quality, and why wouldn't that same calculus apply to their "halo" products?
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.
mrguyorama 21 hours ago [-]
This basically means Nissan is dying. It's finances are screwed right now, and this was essentially their last hope. Nissan may not survive the year.
wil421 19 hours ago [-]
They’ve had multiple quarters where sales dropped by 90%, they’ve been dying for over a decade.
owlninja 20 hours ago [-]
This made me think of the Nissan.com guy and am just now learning he passed in 2020.
I doubt the Japanese government will let Nissan fold and will instead invest directly, allow Foxconn to take over or some combination thereof. Losing the formerly mighty Nissan would be a big black eye for the government.
vardump 20 hours ago [-]
Both are likely dying. Small manufacturers have hard time moving to mass market EV age, even EV pioneering Nissan.
encom 20 hours ago [-]
As a Leaf owner, that has me worried :/
olyjohn 16 hours ago [-]
Nissan probably has already quit making parts for your car anyways. None of the automakers make parts a priority anymore. The aftermarket will keep your car afloat for a while.
morkalork 20 hours ago [-]
I don't understand what went wrong here, for a while the Nissan Leaf was _the_ economical all electric sedan. Toyota was and still is dragging their feet on it and Nissan had a lead for years just to blow it?
kenhwang 20 hours ago [-]
For starters, the Leaf wasn't a sedan, it was a hatchback. In the US market, hatchbacks have always significantly lagged sedans in sales despite being more practical. The regular Prius has evolved to look sleeker and sportier with each generation, but the boxy hatchback Prius V variant was quickly discontinued after introduction due to poor sales.
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.
r00fus 19 hours ago [-]
Several things: hatchbacks do great if you size the up and call them "crossover SUVs" - see Mach-E, Ioniq 5, EV6, Ariya, etc.
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.
tonymet 15 hours ago [-]
Auto industry is an impossible game. Policy makers are forcing them to run concurrent production lines (ICE & electric) , absurdly complex product development, and consumers don't yet want electric vehicles.
You can see this in car price explosion and tanking profits.
The result will be consolidation and further automotive inflation.
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.
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.
https://pca.st/episode/20821dad-77e6-4e04-a97c-969661953c77
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.
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.
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.
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.
(Noting that this is hydrogen for vehicles; hydrogen in other applications are separate matters that should not be painted with the same broad brush.)
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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).
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.
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.
Well in all fairness he is above the law. He walked out of Japan and is free in his country.
Even better: He escaped by hiding in a music equipment box that was carried onto a private jet
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-57760993
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:
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt15048602/
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?
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...
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.
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!)
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.
https://archive.is/ijY1o
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.
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.
TIL that Nissan has an EV strategy, other than "build the world's first mass-market EV (Leaf), then ignore it for a decade".
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
In Shanghai at one point the cost of a ICE vehicle registration cost more than a low end EV.
Companies are so much more than the consumer experience.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
[1] https://carnewschina.com/2025/01/13/byd-surpass-toyota-in-ja...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Tesla/Nio are a bad examples - many EVs were built to be sold and essentially ignored by the manufacturer.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisker_Ocean
Fisker was always a scam if you remember back from days of Fisker Karma.
* 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.
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.
I hope China learns this lesson an makes some changes. At least they have a bit more runway to do so.
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.
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.
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.
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.
* https://population.un.org/wpp/graphs?loc=124&type=Probabilis...
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.
[0]: https://ukfoundations.co/
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.
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...
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.
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)
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.
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.
All i see is competition. Companies cheat by relying on ip to begin with and it hurts the consumer.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/tesla-sales-drop-1.7421653
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.
https://evmagazine.com/news/teslas-european-decline-musks-ev...
Others have seen big increases.
> Tesla almost 60% fewer cars in Germany in January than in the year-earlier period... The overall segment of battery-electric vehicles, where Tesla is competing, however, gained popularity in January, with sales up 53.5% at almost 34,500 vehicles across all brands.
> A total of 405 new Teslas were registered in Sweden last month, down 44% from January 2024, while registrations in Norway fell to 689, a decline of 38% over the same period, despite soaring overall demand for cars in the two countries.
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-...
I tried to find individual manufacturer numbers but couldn't. I did find this:
> Global sales of fully electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids (PHEV) rose 17.7% year on year to 1.3 million in January, the third consecutive month of slowing growth, the Rho Motion data showed.
> Europe reported sales of 0.25 million, up 21% from the same month of 2024.
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/global...
The newish old model 3 I had for a few weeks during a backordered warranty repair was worse than either of them. The charging cable would get stuck. Sometimes the doors wouldn't open and I'd have to reboot the car. The headliner glue failed and dumped the roof on my head. You couldn't see through the rear window if it was raining too hard. Sentry mode would take 8-10% of the battery overnight. Many features simply didn't work without the cellular plan.
You think there was a glass defect? or was it just wet?
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://nissan.com/
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.
You can see this in car price explosion and tanking profits.
The result will be consolidation and further automotive inflation.