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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.
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.
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.
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
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.
“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?
There's a good BBC documentary if you're able to find it. The original source was: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000xw3j
https://www.wsj.com/articles/carlos-ghosn-escape-japan-priva...
There is a series on Apple as well.
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.
There is a good netflix series about it.
He's certainly known for thinking outside the box. (but not always ;) )
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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.
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
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..
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.
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.
There's an alternative future where some genius figured out a technical innovation for hydrogen and batteries struggle to scale. There are definite disadvantages to hydrogen in retrospect, but some of that has to do with the relative success of the engineers.
Hydrogen is also not particularly "green" without further spending for generation capacity.
Currently, most hydrogen is produced from fossil fuels, specifically natural gas. Electricity—from the grid or from renewable sources such as wind, solar, geothermal, or biomass—is also currently used to produce hydrogen. In the longer term, solar energy and biomass can be used more directly to generate hydrogen.
Sure but the same is true for charging batteries.
Going directly to batteries is far more efficent. Going from power to hydrogen is incredibly inefficent. So at least not as much energy needs to be produced.
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.)
> 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]:
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...
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).
The wet timing belt reduces fuel consumption by about 1% so you can thank efficiency requirements for that.
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.
>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.
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.
> 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?
”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.
Do you think individual technical contribution is the hardest part of retooling an entire industrial supply chain? Making a car is easy.
As per "Gung Ho", starring ~Batman~ Michael Keaton.
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).
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
I do not recall Sun being renamed into “Java”. It was acquired by Oracle as Sun Microsystems.
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.
Correct, I recall the stock ticker symbol was renamed to JAVA, but not the company.
Yes I should have clarified that that was stock ticker (or found another actual example).
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).
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Ghosn's analysis was pretty sharp: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljewn28Korw
> 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).
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.
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.
> 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. [...] I have seen far more innovation from China than from USA.
I full agree on this.
But what people also often miss is that wage levels are not even close to comparable. Chinese manufacturing pays an average of <$25k (purchasing parity adjusted, ~15k otherwise!!) for a 49h week.
It is absolutely expected that the US is not competitive in labor intensive industries, simply because Americans are rich. Trying to "fix" this with tariffs and relaxed regulations (to lure heavy industry/manufacturing back) is an expensive experiment doomed to fail, and taxpayers and consumers are gonna pay the price.
If you campaign with "we're gonna bring back tons of jobs that pay $5/hour, but don't worry, taxpayers/consumers are gonna pick up the difference", suddenly the whole thing does not sound that good any more.
3-9x equivalent US / European subsidies is a big difference. https://www.ifw-kiel.de/publications/foul-play-on-the-scale-...
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)
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.).
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.
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.
Boy, that final paragraph sure looks like another automaker CEO…
His pay sounds small in retrospect and hardly compares to what Elon extracts from Tesla, but still deemed high by Japan's standards where employee's jobs are considered sacrosanct in a more just system. Ultimately that was why he was hired in the first place, and Nissan needed such a outsider at a critical moment to reform themselves but didn't learn from it unfortunately.
Asianometry: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsL6JAUZFiQ
No he was clearly always an asshole (but I agree he clearly had some genius)
> 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.
> He walked out of Japan
Even better: He escaped by hiding in a music equipment box that was carried onto a private jet
There are two well-known documentaries about the Goshn captivity and escape from Japan.
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:
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
> 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.
Comment was deleted :(
> 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!
https://img.20mn.fr/FofgQudYQhKtDOGwCHCuRyk/1444x920_un-cust...
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.
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.
Not so - Japan's [criminal] justice system is absolutely not "universally considered to be one of the worlds' fairest". Cite any authoritative source for claiming that. Most sources I found cite the Nordic countries or other W European countries.
(A high conviction rate at trial in Japan is merely due to not having a right-to-silence, imprisonment till trial, prosecutors discretionarily dropping some cases.)
Japan is 14th here (above UK, Belgium, France, Spain and the US): https://worldjusticeproject.org/rule-of-law-index/global/202...
Most of the stereotypes of the Japanese justice system are outdated, and it's pretty funny to hear one of the wealthiest people in the world claim he wouldn't get a fair trial there while he was walking free with unrestricted access to his lawyers after numerous arrests for serious financial crimes.
"universally considered to be one of the worlds' fairest" is not accurate, and "good by Asian standards, but not as good as the North European average" is more like it.
It is not stereotype but simple fact to state that Ghosn was held for questioning for a ridiculously long time by Western standards: 129 days over two periods in the Tokyo Detention House, of which 53 before indictment. Eight hours a day questioning, with no defense lawyer allowed to be present. You might somehow incriminate yourself if that was done to you too.
Ghosn was absolutely a special case: it was extremely plausible that he wouldn't get a fair trial there, as he was the highest-profile (non-Asian) foreigner in Japanese industry, with saturation international media coverage, and moreover there was major protectionism within the two car companies against operationally merging with Renault and actually having plant closings and major layoffs in one of Japan's most sacred industries, which also reportedly incurred high-level opposition from government. (This is not commenting on the specifics of Ghosn's financial case.)
And again, the fact that few high-profile white-collar cases go to trial but end in a plea (which you say is a virtue of the Japanese system) makes it hard to predict what might have happened, both evidence admissibility, verdict and sentence. Certainly unlikely he would have gotten a suspended sentence, if convicted.
UPDATE: Japan’s prosecutor reportedly repeatedly broke the law by leaking details of the case against Ghosn. Which pretty much corroborates both "wouldn't have gotten a fair trial" and "high-level political opposition".
UPDATE 2: RP was one of a handful of Nissan insiders who knew about the planned arrests beforehand: "I was called into Hari Nada's office…and told there was going to be a dramatic arrest. Arranged for maximum publicity... When you lie to someone, to get them back into a particular jurisdiction, so that you can have them arrested in a very public manner, that says a lot about what's going on." [0]
> 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 SEC found that he had over $140M in undisclosed compensation, much of it hidden from Nissan’s management: https://www.sec.gov/files/litigation/complaints/2019/comp246...
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!
> The SEC found that he had over $140M in undisclosed compensation, much of it hidden from Nissan’s management: https://www.sec.gov/files/litigation/complaints/2019/comp246...
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.
> 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!)
> 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.
> 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.
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..
As much as i think, that he would never have gotten a fair trial … he did not even pay his escape helpers.
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 .
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.
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)
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.
So surprising to me that GM’s most successful EV in some ways is sold by Honda.
Still pissed they removed the Jazz from the australian market. It was honestly my definition of perfect small car for 10 years.
The end of the honda element makes me grumpy too.
Uhh, the Odyssey is still best of breed for minivans in the price segment.
Yet still bland and undifferentiated and a minivan.
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.
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.
Not to mention that the Sienna hybrid gets crazy good fuel economy for a mini van.
>I'm not personally convinced that minivans lend themselves to much differentiation.
I agree. That is why my original thesis was that Hondas are now uninspiring, undifferentiated and boring. Pretty much minivans are all those things, by default.
Ah yes, so then you buy a 4 door pickup truck or crossover which isn't as good as the minivan in any practical way. But at least you aren't driving a minivan. Your peen size is safe from the world.
I'd happily drive a minivan because they are better than small pickups, SUVs and crossovers in many ways but they're boring and thats the mold they're trying to fill. If someone broke that mold then maybe they'd find people like the utilitarian appeal of the minivan but want a little bit more than the bare necessities of hauling children.
Ad hominem attacks against fellow posters is very anti-HN.
I'd definitely disagree. Current Odysseys are absolutely a premium feel, especially in the higher trims. In fact, thats part of what sets them apart. The entire experience just feels so much nicer overall. The seats, the sound system, the performance, the thoughtful technology integration.. its a great car overall and is especially noticeable when compared apples-to-apples with other brands.
source: I own a 2017 odyssey, and friend to many other minivan owners
I test drove a 2023 Odyssey and Sienna and could barely tell them apart.
Honda E?
habe you seen the Honda e?
The Honda e which is no longer produced? https://www.motor1.com/news/700419/honda-e-production-ending...
Its cute but not particularly exciting in my opinion, what do you think?
and it's not a tenth as good looking as the concept
Unfortunately they never are.
I would have bought one had it even had a 50kwh battery, but 35kwh made it just dead in the water to me unfortunately.
Funny that's what those Nissan CVT's and variable compression engines are only good for, anchors.
nah they're far too freakin fragile to be anchors, given how regularly they shatter or break
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!).
I could not understand why this merger was happening. What possible benefit was there for Honda to take on Nissan's cruft?
> 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".
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.
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!"
I don't think people realize just how much thoughtful design went into the original Nissan Leaf and just how well designed it was. Sure, it's ugly as sin and a glorified golf cart with respect to it's range but it's also a rock solid EV and very forward thinking EV.
In terms of safety, it came standard with backup cameras and low speed noise features that are now mandatory on all EVs in the US. In 2013 they introduced a heat-pump option and had features like heated seats and steering wheel to reduced the climate control draw on the meager battery.
The Tesla Model 3 that came out 5 years later didn't have low speed noise, heat-pump, or heated steering wheel. Though they were added later.
In terms of reliability, it just works, so many other EVs are completely unreliable and suffer from numerous issues, many of which have nothing to do with the EV platform. Tesla, Lucid, and VW all have or had issues with door handles. GM couldn't seem to make water proof batteries that didn't explode. Kia's EVs go through 12v batteries faster than a vibrator goes through AA batteries. BMWs are great right up until you DC Fast Charge them, at which point they like to go into limp mode and throw faults.
more like culture problem per se, this is what happen to (almost) all of CE automaker seriously, EV is more like electronic on wheels rather than "traditional cars"
I kind of see many people that already have work there that have decade experience don't or can't "changes"
I was surprised to see a very popular model here (Qashqai) doesn’t have a full EV version yet, only hybrid.
The leaf and the Qashqi are pretty similar.
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.
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.
https://www.msn.com/en-xl/news/other/honda-s-ceo-struggles-t...
Ahhh TY; that makes sense.
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.
> 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?
> 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.
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.
The last time the boss of Nissan didn’t do what they wanted, they put him in prison
Ghosn? He was charged for stealing millions of dollars from Nissan, but he fled the country before ever going to prison.
He was, but his corruption was clearly not the reason for his arrest. They were fine with him living like king until he went against the Nissan faction
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.
> 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.
You read about the sub like $20K EVs in China and you think "maybe we're due to get belt and roaded here."
I think they are like $15k rather than sub $20k
Though I wonder if EVs are really all that good without the infrastructure.. With state of the potholes and electric infrastructure in most countries, can EVs hold up?
Why would potholes matter?
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.
Was surprised how popular there are, also self driving taxis in Wuhan and other places.
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.
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.
Nissan has a following in the work vehicle category and is well established especially outside the us. They’re not nothing.
nissan has inventory, factories, dealers , sales channels, financing , inventory, partner relationships.
Companies are so much more than the consumer experience.
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.
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.
>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.
What about Mazda?
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.
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.
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..
[1] https://roadgenius.com/cars/statistics/sales-by-manufacturer...
Mazda seems to be doing pretty well selling SUVs in the US though with growing sales and its highest US market share since 1990.
https://www.automotivedive.com/news/mazda-boosts-us-market-s...
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.
> 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.
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%
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)
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.
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.
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.
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
[1] https://carnewschina.com/2025/01/13/byd-surpass-toyota-in-ja...
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.
https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Automobiles/Electric-vehicl...
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
I live in Tokyo and have never seen a BYD in the wild.
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.
[0]https://www.businessinsider.com/chinese-evs-losses-widen-des...
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.
Easily the biggest killer for most people in the continental US is winter road salt. You go to California and a decent fraction of people people are still driving the same 80s and 90s corollas in whatever condition at this point. That car was totalled decades ago in the northeast, and if it still exist you are liable to fall through the floorpan.
I have a Nissan Micra from 1998, working fine. Great little car. I inherited from my grandfather.
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.
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.
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.
Meanwhile I bought a 2024 Toyota that gets 10mpg and I fucking love it.
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.
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 ;-)
Comment was deleted :(
I honestly don't understand how anyone can not be ashamed talking about their car getting 10 MPG.
[flagged]
Or maybe some customers are morons. Who knows.
A car getting 10 MPG consumes, in just 60 miles of driving, the energy equivalent of a household's monthly electricity usage, and can travel less than 200 meters on the energy generated by four hours of running on a treadmill.
Please explain to me how thinking that this is absolutely atrocious speaks to my limited worldview?
Sorry, I didn't state that very well. Permit me to retry.
For a lot of people (I'm not actually one of them; I don't even have a car, but I know many of them), the energy efficiency of their vehicle isn't one of the top concerns — or even a concern at all.
Gasoline is available everywhere; they make enough money that the cost of gas doesn't matter to them. They care more about things like: How comfortable is the car to ride around in? How fast can it go from 0 to 100kph? What is the top speed? Does it look cool? Is it bulletproof? Can it connect to my phone without me fiddling with it? Does it have a premium sound system? And so on.
Their response to your comment would be something like, "Whatever, hippie."
It's literally something that a lot of people don't think about even once. This forum doesn't skew that way, I reckon, but I'm pretty sure sure that the vast majority of people who care about fuel efficiency of vehicles care because their financial situation means they have to think about the cost of gasoline (and that is a lot of people, perhaps most). Then there are some people who care about it because that's just their nature, or because they've thought through the consequences and external effects of these inefficient vehicles (a small sliver of people, although energetic about expressing their opinions).
Do you consider the electrical power usage of your computer's GPU? Given your comment, I suspect you might. There is likewise a sliver of GPU users and enthusiasts who compare the efficiency of GPUs, and think about that when building, say, a gaming PC. But most gaming PC builders do not think about that much, and certainly not enough to sway their purchase (let alone feeling "ashamed"). They just care about how many frames per second they can get in their game, and if the drivers are going to be reliable and games will run well.
That's just how it is. Most people don't care about power efficiency until they have to care, because of the money.
Having said all that, now that I have been forced to think about it, yes, a brand-new vehicle that gets only 10MPG is, in fact, atrocious. Absurd, even.
If I did have one, "ashamed" might be overstating it, but I would at least be a little embarrassed — if I ever thought about it. But most people don't, and I think that is the answer to your question.
Good for you, not so good for the climate, but we get our oil from Putin and I'd rather not to.
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.
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.
> 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.
I keep hearing that too and it feels like a huge attribution error: the cars die because of the electronics because they are the new component with the shortest lifespan, so people blame them. Yet people fail to notice that the longevity of cars is on average, trending up while the amount of electronics in them has exploded. And it makes sense if you think about it for more than a second: which would you rather die first, the cheap electronic board/sensor or the expensive mechanical part?
My theory is that a lot of auto mechanics are very mechanically minded, so if the problems start being electrical they don't have the equipment or the skill set to solve the issue beyond simple power.
I saw a video the other day where a Ram truck was having issues on the CAN bus after driving 33 miles and would settle down after 10-15 minutes. The tech was pretty much stumped and pretty much only figured it out by brute force. A capacitor on one of the CAN terminators failed making its capacitance higher than spec and screwed up the filtration harmonics after charging for those 33 miles.
There's also two sides to "reliable" where either it's simple to fix or never breaks down. Always keep that in mind whenever someone is talking about reliability because it's never obvious which definition someone has in mind.
Eh tbh I think "electronics" is code for "DPF" tbh. Hiluxes had to be recalled to be fitted with a DPF manual burn toggle from memory, or they would just hit a wall and die.
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.
True, but they sell fleets on that (now out of date) understanding of reliability.
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.
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.
No way.
Toyota dealers are the worst - their core customer is a like a quiet Tesla fanatic.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Never mind the parts, how do you get your firmware updated without being held hostage?
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.
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.
For one on a data level that's not an accurate statement even limited to the countries in question, here's productivity: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/labor-productivity-per-ho...
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.
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)
I hope China learns this lesson an makes some changes. At least they have a bit more runway to do so.
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.
Good point.
I’d also add that China actually does have future pension liabilities. China’s past one child policy is causing the pyramid to quickly go from 4-2-1 to 1-2-4 in terms of ratio of working to dependents; and young people are already not participating in pensions because they think its highly likely the systems will go bust and they won’t see a cent of their contributions.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-01-07/why-milli...
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.
* https://population.un.org/wpp/graphs?loc=124&type=Probabilis...
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.
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.
Australia is 'winning' even more based on the graph:
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.
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.
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.
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?
I don’t know about the others but many in Canada believe they have the right to an unchanging environment. They just want to “get theirs”, kick out the ladder, and everything stops at that point.
Homeowners still make up the majority of the voter base so they will vote for municipal candidates which prioritize not changing things.
My prediction is that things will inevitably flip when the “have not” group becomes larger than the “have” group, but that might not be for a while as home ownership only became truly unbearable maybe 10-15 years ago.
Another factor is that generational wealth plays a big role in home ownership. The dirty secret is those mid 20s couples down the street did not purchase that house on their own, the either got cosigned by another family member with a hefty down payment gift or they inherited wealth from grandma. There is no estate or gift taxes here so families can perpetuate class transfers forever.
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.
Canada is a Calhounian behavioral sink except they stave off the extinction by importing.
Summary with links to various publications at the end: https://notwokedot.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/The-Behavi...
Canada needs to start a campaign to promote smaller cities, rather than concentrating all the people in Toronto and Vancouver.
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.
This is where WFH could have changed the landscape in Canada but alas, even the federal government is getting on the back to office bandwagon. A whole bunch of your taxes are handled in Sudbury because they setup an office for the CRA there. When you call a company, if you're not talking to an agent in India/Philippines, you're probably talking to one in St John's. Unless you need to be physically present to do manual labour, there's a lot of work that can be done remotely outside of the 3 big cities. It could have been the solution to the death spiral many towns out east are facing.
> One problem is that many Canadians move away from those smaller cities because there aren’t jobs that pay well
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.
Assuming a decent AI and robotics, is a lot of working age population still a good thing? Or just more mouths to feed?
What happens when a country fails?
South Africa is a good example of a country that is currently in that trajectory.
Right, so you expect Germany be like South Africa soon?
I was merely asking your question about what happens when a country fails. I have no expectation of Germany turning out like South Africa.
Right, I'm trying to find out what people expect to happen when a developed country fails.
Like post WWII Axis nations?
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.
Comment was deleted :(
We need only to look to Sudan, Somalia, et al.
So Japan etc. are about to be like Somalia?
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.
not often a comment here makes an impact like that. wow - holy crap.
I can understand point 1. But the other points seems odd to me. 2 is same in China, just delayed by maybe a decade or two but way way way worse due to one child policy.
As for point 3 it also feels odd. When we check stats in the 3 Asian Tigers, the rat race (and young population sentiment around it) seems like Japan < South Korea <<< China. And usually my friends from those countries usually feel the same way. Lie down movement, all the frustration in SK showed to the world through their entertainment kinda shows this too.
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.
They’ve had multiple quarters where sales dropped by 90%, they’ve been dying for over a decade.
This made me think of the Nissan.com guy and am just now learning he passed in 2020.
Oh that’s sad :( I was always rooting for him.
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.
As a Leaf owner, that has me worried :/
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?
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.
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.
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.
Both are likely dying. Small manufacturers have hard time moving to mass market EV age, even EV pioneering Nissan.
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.
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.
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.
Tesla is going down the drain, at least in Europe, unless shareholders evict Musk. Nothing iPhone-like with that brand anymore.
Not just Europe: CA sales are down double digits recently as well: https://www.newsweek.com/tesla-california-sales-decline-elec...
Doing poorly in the other CA (Canada) as well
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.
The fascinating thing is that the political right largely prefers ICE vehicles in the USA. This is a combination of factors, like more rural voters who need more range/work more blue collar jobs/haul firewood/etc. Combined with a personality type that is more cautious about change. And also, the insane prices for things like Teslas here. Perhaps Musk's close association with President Trump will gain him a small number of new rich fans on the political right, but most common Americans in most of the country aren't even considering a Tesla to begin with, and it's the majority of folks with lower incomes that put Trump back in office this time.
The political right in Europe is not the same as the political right in the US. I am myself on the right side of the political spectrum and I despise Trump and more recently Musk. You can probably still find people that don't care, but they are going to be far, far fewer than 30%. Owning a Tesla has become something people apologise for.
Right-wing customers in an EV? Tell us another one.
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I live here. This sentiment is everywhere
that has changed drastically recently. Big drops in sales in EU.
Other EV manufacturers are essentially picking up the lost sales and the EV market as a whole is up marginally.
https://evmagazine.com/news/teslas-european-decline-musks-ev...
And have other EV makers seen more success or have they all had declines?
> 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.
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...
Tesla makes great products.
Tesla has great battery and motor tech. Their quality control and car interiors leave a lot to be desired.
The interior (and exterior) misfeatures is why wouldn't buy a Tesla... also, I'd prefer a slightly smaller car.
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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.
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?
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).
Something, something, anecdotes and data. I've had three of them. All perfect. So I'm at least thrice as right as you are on the topic, I guess.
But in all seriousness: I don't doubt that there are Teslas out there with issues. All car manufacturers make bad cars occasionally.
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".
Which is fine, but that's a totally different argument than the idea that they're "bad cars".
Like I said, Elon's viability as leader is absolutely up for question. But that has nothing to do with the quality of the vehicle.
This sounds like political venting more than a financial analysis.
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.
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...
I cannot read the FT article, but the nyt article says sales have halved, and are now under 2k per month in Germany.
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.
"Tesla’s sales plummet across Europe"
Financial Times January 2025
https://www.ft.com/content/ea2329e4-b4bc-4e2d-be34-e9a8ea311...
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").
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah lots of room thats true.
> 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.
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.
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.
Interesting, it looks like they've dropped their prices a lot since the last time I checked. You're right.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
Let's say you convinced your relatives to stop boycotting those products. Then, the CEO of a company behind one of those products, appeared at a political rally in the ex-imperial country, wearing the symbols and colors of thebold imperial regime, and waving a flag showing the old imperial borders.
I think your relatives would be quite justified in boycotting that one product.
You can make your purchasing decisions however you like. Other's don't. Ignoring war trauma makes someone a shit businessperson, at best.
Tim Walz hit his chest and then throw up a Nazi salute during the campaign. Where was the outrage? Where was the 24/7 news coverage?
Well one of these two people spoke at the German far rights neo-nazi party (AFD) rally not long ago.
If AfD is a neo-nazi party then why is their leader a lesbian married to a woman of a different race? Seems like these Nazis aren't being very Nazi like in their leaders.
Well Hitler wasn't a blue-eyed blond German either.
If Hitler was married to a Sri Lanken man he wouldn't have been accepted by those who believed in racial purity aka the Nazis...
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
Honda will be fine. They own the motorcycle market, especially in Asia.
Noone is excited about hondas, its all about Chinese bikes - cfmotos, koves, etc.
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.
[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...
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
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
What I was saying had absolutely nothing to do with the Chinese internal market. I'm talking about Chinese companies making EVs and exporting them, consuming a market Japan should've logically taken.
> cheats
All i see is competition. Companies cheat by relying on ip to begin with and it hurts the consumer.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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)
I mean, I kind of understand Nissan's position of not wanting to be a subsidy. And while Nissan is probably in a worse position than Honda, Honda has fallen from grace as well, they were/are a one trick pony and also in danger of complete irrelevance.
What I don't get is how Nissan exited so many segments it did well in... Look at off-road SUVs: Jeep is making a killing selling Wranglers, Ford can't keep Broncos in stock, Toyota is now selling 4Runners AND Land Cruisers in the US, where's the new Xterra?
Compact to midsize trucks are all the rage too, Nissan basically ignored that segment not updating the Frontier for what, 15 years? Then coming out with a new Frontier that is already 10 years behind on arrival...
They squandered their first mover advantage in EVs...
They literally gave up on everything that isn't a cheap shitbox, all they seem to sell is bland, cheap small SUVs and cars. Meanwhile a bunch of segments they used to care about are exploding.
Honda meanwhile doesn't really have any hits other than the Civic and maybe CR-V... Their SUVs are boring, their cars are boring, they have no off roader, never seen one of their EVs (according to their website it exists). Hyundai/Kia are doing everything Honda is doing but better. Honda has racing pedigree and probably could be doing something interesting but they just aren't.
An actual merger with a new name and some new energy could have revitalized them both and allowed them to escape the past if neither of them want to play to their historical strengths anyway... Honda making Nissan a subsidiary though is also old thinking, and just ain't it.
Many years ago, companies believed in diversification. Not having all their eggs in one basket and hopefully having one of their half dozen research projects pay off in the long run. Nowadays it is about sacrificing your future for short term profits.
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.
Crafted by Rajat
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