Nissan is having problems because their reliability has gone to crap since they merged with Renault and their fit/finish is below Toyota, Honda and even Subaru. Infiniti seems to be doing much better except for its halo (Q and QX) lines. Imagine what would've happened to Nissan had General Motors come into the Renault mix. Hint to Nissan: Bring the Skyline-GT to the US now!
Nissan's CEO says they have a "performance crisis", earnings are down 22%. "The woes at Nissan, which is 44 percent owned by Renault SA of France, underlined the diverging fortunes of the automaker and its archrivals Toyota Motor Corp. and Honda Motor Co., which have both notched up record earnings while boosting market share in the United States and elsewhere." But he's doing the right move in that he's looking at management issues, not trying to pass the blame elsewhere. Consumer Reports really likes the new Altima, ranking it the top sedan this year in this month's issue. Now if he just put his support behind the Altima hybrid, figured out how to make it profitable like Honda and Toyota have, then they might get somewhere. More at http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/070202/earns_japan_nissan.html?.v=11
Consumer Reports is that same fine organization that started the misinformation campaign against the Prius a couple years ago - or last year. If they fall over themselves for the Altima hybrid, it might seem just a little odd.
<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(allargon @ Feb 2 2007, 02:04 AM) [snapback]384688[/snapback]</div> That's a possible reason but it's hard to say how much that is to blame. Nissan reliability has declined somewhat due to numerous unreliable models being out (2003 [1st model year] 350Zs, Sentras, Titan, Armada and Quest) but they never were better overall in reliability than Toyota or Honda AFAIK. Than Canton. MS plant is to blame for the last 3 models. http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/artic.../702030363/1148 has a graph showing their income over recent years. Ghosn was able to pull Nissan out of near bankruptcy and turn them around to making record profits, but I guess things had to slow down as it was hard to sustain it. http://www.detnews.com/2005/autosinsider/0.../A01-101491.htm is one of many articles on this. He's a straight shooter in interviews and I have to say, he appears to be a very talented manager.
