We have been extolling the virtues of Nissan for years, in so far as Nissan has no virtues. The company has been festering for a long time relying on ill-conceived marketing efforts to convince a buying public who isn’t bothering with Nissan anymore. In the UK, Nissan has relied on a willing and compliant motoring media to cover the cracks. Our interactions with Nissan PR was less than ideal. The then head of PR, Tom Barnard, made negative comments about the DCB a few years ago during a Twitter chat. For what reason is still unclear. He thought it was a private chat but we had a fascinating insight into the lunacy and delusion of Nissan and the people who were meant to be ambassadors of the brand. We expected nothing less, after all, the company was formerly led by a man who hid in a suitcase to escape corruption charges in Japan.
And now Nissan, in the post-Ghosn era, is admitting that it makes less than ideal cars. When we say less than ideal we mean awful. In the past, we would have opted to use the preferred vernacular “Nissan makes fucking shit cars”. But these days we have changed our approach and now use less aggression to make an assertive point. It seems Nissan wants to bury its past and along with it Carlos Ghosn and Tom Barnard. During a recent media interview, Nissan’s COO Ashwani Gupta outlined what has gone wrong.
Ashwani Gupta:
“We went too fast to expand in the world, anticipating that global auto markets would grow and that our sales performance would be excellent. Both those things didn’t happen,”
Roughly translated, Ashwani is admitting Nissan made shit cars under Carlos Ghosn.
Ashwani Gupta:
“When rubber touches the ground you smell the smoke. As a result, we were landed with aged vehicles, a huge line-up which we could not maintain. It’s all based on investment: if you don’t have the revenue you can’t have [new] cars. It’s a vicious cycle. So what Nissan said is: let’s rationalize.”
Roughly translated, Ashwani is admitting Nissan made shit business decisions under Carlos Ghosn.
Ashwani’s plan is to go back to basics and use a tried and tested business model to turn around Nissan’s declining fortunes. And that is to implement cost-cutting procedures. Cost-cutting is another way of saying job losses, factory closures. This is the same business model implemented by Carlos Ghosn who was infamously dubbed the “cost cutter”. If Ghosns’ business model didn’t work, how on earth is Gupta going to succeed?
