Ghosn Steps Down as Nissan CEO
 

I applaud what Ghosn was able to accomplish at Nissan from an organizational point of view, and from saving it from bankruptcy in the early 2000s. But, unfortunately, in doing so, the quality of their vehicles suffered....first, from excessively cheap Cracker-Jack interiors, and then, once that problem had been rectified, from lower-than-average reliability ratings. They appear to come from the factory well-assembled, but develop problems quicker than average.

Its amazing how cheap the Maxima's interior feels, at least the entry model that I sat in. And people complain about the Avalon's interior being cheap.

The real Cracker-Jack Nissan interiors I was refering to were back 10-15 years ago, in the early 2000s, when Ghosn's stern cost-cutting measures first took hold. Nissan products, today, seem to come from the factory pretty solidly-assembled, using decent materials (maybe some of the entry-level Versa versions excepted)...but, for some reason, are developing problems quicker than average, according to Consumer Reports. Renault, of course, Nissan's current owner, has never been known for building reliable street-vehicles.

The slang adjective "crackerjack" usually refers to something that is of high quality rather than something that is of low quality.

Good luck Mr. Saikawa. Please revamp the Z, Frontier, and Quest

That might (?) be a result of a difference in our ages. I wasn't born yesterday, and have been driving since the late 1960s. Cracker-Jack was a popular snack back then....small boxes of caramel-coated popcorn, with a small, cheap usually plastic toy stuck somewhere in the box.......you uncovered the toy as you ate up the popcorn. We would refer to anything flimsy, plastic, or easily breakable as "Cracker-Jack"......so did the auto press and reviewers back then, when they reviewed vehicles.

Later on, of course, the term "Crack" came along (not the cocaine LOL)....to refer to something excellent or elite.........such as "crack" troops or units in the military.

Big news! I read that it was Ghosn's wife who came up with the Murano convertible so he "greenlighted" it. For that atrocity alone, he should step down.

But in all seriousness, once he got past the cost-cutting he did quite a bit to bring the company back on track.

I heard Ghosn is legendary in his management. He saved Nissan corp from Bankruptcy.. but Will Nissan go down the tubes again without him?

So is he still the CEO or chairman of the Nissan-Renault-Mitsubishi entity??? From what I've read he stepped out of his role of running Nissan on a day to day basis to concentrate on "the alliance" as they call it. Maybe I'm simplifying it a bit here, but it looks like he was promoted.

Also I'm kind of curious as to why Nissan was in such financial trouble back in the late 90's/early 2000's. Their cars from that time period were better built(and IMO the designs were better too) than the crap post Ghosn made in the 2000's. Did Nissan get hit hard when the bubble economy popped in Japan back in the 1990's???

I don't recall Nissan being that close to closing it's doors. They had troubles like everyone else at the time. Either way, I haven't been real impressed by Ghosn. Nissans have not had interiors worthy of the competition and reliability has been poor for a while. Then there's the odd styling of headlights, C-pillars, and grilles. I am sure that turns some people away at dealerships.

One thing that hurt them back then was that Nissan lost a lot of money on lease-programs when the vehicles' actual depreciation was greater than projected, resulting in in lower residual values.

Their worst interiors were from about 2001-2006, when Ghosn started implementing his strictest cost-cutting measures.


I don't think it's any more weird than a number of the styling touches that Toyota is doing. And folks still flock to Toyota stores.

Agreed, I have been in a couple of Versa Notes and I feel the interior is very cheap, reminiscent of a late 2000's car. When I looked at a Maxima I thought it was rather decent though - no Lexus but pretty good for a mainstream-badged car.

The weird thing about it is that my girlfriend used to have a 2012 Versa hatch (before the redesign), and it seemed to be more comfortable and nicer in some ways than the new Note. :/

True, the Versa is quite cheaply built, but it is not a complete waste of money. It has a fair amount of room in the back seat for a car in that size and price-range.

+1, it's certainly a good car for the money. The back seat was about as big as the one in my (former) Camry.

Regarding nissan getting saved from BK, was it the introduction of the first gen Altima (pre-Stanza) that saved Nissan?

Not quite sure what you mean? :uh: The Altima, in 1993, was after the Stanza, not before it.

I was a big fan of the non-sporting versions of the 1Gen Altima....in fact, strongly considered buying one. They had very nice interior trim, rode comfortably and quietly, and shifted like butter...in an era when many automatics tended to downshift (and sometimes upshift) with a noticeable bump. Later on, though, cost-cutting cheapened the car.

The interiors vary from model to model, and within models, from trim level to trim level.

I am 100% impressed with my sister's Murano's interior. It's wonderful.

I've been driving a rental Nissan Rogue for 2 weeks and I hate it. Good lord it's terrible. Everything is hard plastic.

That is true. Toyota has some funky styling going on. However, they also have the excellent reliability card to keep sales numbers rolling. Loyalty due to that is legendary. Not so much with Nissan. Nissan has kind of been like a cheap date.

Totally agree. We leased an '06 Maxima as a third car because we were putting so many miles on our primary cars. The interior was terrible. Hard plastic painted like aluminum and cheap orange lighting in the gauges. The paint quality was no better, but the lease was cheap.

I also owned an '06 Infiniti M45 Sport at the time. There were a lot of cost-cutting measures that were evident in the interior, but it sure was a pleasure to drive. That's when Infiniti was chasing BMW.

But yes, Ghosn was clearly responsible for those cheap interior materials.

Both Nissan and Infiniti, at that time, used that strange orange-yellow color for the panel lights. No other manufacturer that I can think of or remember ever used it, though some, like BMW , Pontiac, Mazda (which are generally considered sport-oriented brands) used a red-orange color that was (and is) popular in racing vehicles and aircraft.

I agree he gets the blame for it. But, under the circumstances, something had to be done. Nissan was rapidly going down the tubes, and, like it or not, costs HAD to be cut somewhere. My own personal opinion is that, Instead of cheapening out the interiors, which owners had to sit inside of and stare at every day, better methods of cost-control could have been implemented that did not impact the public image of their vehicles quite so much on a day-to-day basis. For one, the XTerra could have been dropped altogether, long before it actually was, with Nissan saving the costs of producing it. From what I could tell, it served little function except to serve as a Japanese-designed off-road Jeep...at a time when fewer and fewer SUV owners were actually going off-road at all. And, on-road, it was a stiff, uncomfortable vehicle that jarred one over bumps. IMO, Nissan could have dropped it long ago, and few people would have cared. But, of course, Ghosn chose not to do it that way....he hit the interiors instead. Still, though, in doing so (like it or not), it helped save the corporation....and he will be remembered in automotive history for that.

Again, he was the one who green-lighted that atrocity, the Murano Cross Cabriolet (that nobody asked for or bought), because his wife thought it was a good idea. Yes, I know he already had a chassis to work from, but that was another example of spending money needlessly when other models should have been the focus. Not one of his better decisions.

​​​​​​http://blog.caranddriver.com/2011-ni...-drive-review/

Ooops, yes you're correct MMarshall.
I meant to say post-Stanza. The designs back then was so boxy (I should know, I had an 87 maxima.:D) and felt that nissan's offerings were pretty stale.

So the introduction of the new design-theme probably helped saved nissan then?

No problem......I sometimes make typos, too. :)

Yes, some of those earlier Stanza sedans were classic three-box designs (a large box for the cabin, and two smaller ones for the hood and trunk)

The 1Gen Altimas, IMO, were very impressive, and I was a big fan of their design and road manners (and I almost bought one). Other Nissan products of that era were generally well-designed and built, too.....and, of course, the Infiniti Division started off in 1990 with a whole new level of customer service that, at that time, was undreamed of at Nissan. But that apparently caused the company to bite off more than it could chew....and Infiniti sales trailed those of Lexus, so the corporation did not profit as much. When Renault took over, that alone, IMO, set the stage for at least some quality-loss in Nissan products, as Renault has never been known for reliability in its vehicles. But the real factor was the massive cost-cutting that CEO Ghosn ordered around 2000...that was when Nissan started to get Mickey-Mouse interiors that were like toy vehicles in some ways. Mechanical quality stayed high (in the Japanese tradition) for several years, but, then, it, too, started to drop. In the late 2000s, some improvement in the interiors slowly started to come back (a little earlier than that for the Altima), but reliability suffered in relation to that of other Japanese makes. Yes, I'd say that the cost-cutting eventually saved Nissan and Infiniti...but at the cost (for a time) of some unpleasant and (later) unreliable vehicles.

I actually liked the 1st gen Altima, buddy in high school had one for a first car. We called it "the golden egg". Yeah the rounded styling is rather passe now days, but compared to how ugly and boxy Nissans(and almost all cars) from the 1980's were, it was a revelation. Interior was really well screwed together as well, had really nice velour upholstrey, drove very tight, felt light on its feet, looked great, interior looked brand new and that car had over 150k miles on it.

The Altima from the 2000's was bigger, lots more room, and fast with the V6, but man it felt like a piece of junk compared to the 90's car, laughable how bad the interior was on those cars. Of course back in the 1990's if you wanted the big car, you bought the Maxima(once again a way better car than the 2000's Maxima), the Altima was more of a really nice compact car back then.

Yes, I had a '93 Infiniti J30, and that style trickled down to the Altima. It looked like a mini-J30. Looked nice.

Compared to the rest of the car, I thought the rear end of the J30 looked like an egg LOL.

http://accredcross.org/wp-content/up...niti-j30-3.jpg

Interesting fact, the J30 was styled after a toilet. Imagine if you took a plaster mold of a toilet bowl, flipped it over, there you go, Infiniti J30(and 1st gen Altima). I kid you not about this . .

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_a...s_cojones.html

Well, it may have styled after a toilet, but it sure didn't drive like one. I thought it drove better than the Lexus ES of that vintage, but that, of course, was to change with the later, superb 4Gen ES.

Its the prettiest looking toilet I've ever seen. Both the J30 and 1st gen Altima are very 90's designs, but hey at least they were unique. The J30 was RWD, I think it had the same chassis as the larger Q45. In Japan you could get this car with the V8 out of the Q45, of course back in the 1990's Nissan never gave us any cool performance options. No surprise that it drove better than the more conventional, FWD, Camry based ES300, it was using a much more sophisticated chassis.

When I said it drove better than the early-vintage ES models, I was referring to more of a big, refined, quiet, luxury-car feel. More refined and smoother-driving ES models did not come, IMO, until several years later.

Anyhow, since the thread is on Ghosn, how would you rate his performance, overall, in handling Nissan? I won't necessarily add a poll because they're are many different answers.

I'd give him probably between a 6 or 7 out of 10. His actions did, in fact, save Nissan and Infiniti from bankruptcy (which, at the time, was Project A). But, in doing so, after the late 1990s, we got a string of what were IMO were unimpressive and cheapened-out Nissan products, and, later on, declining reliability. Some of the former "niceness" of the old Nissan products has recently come back, though, as the need for cost-cutting was waned. And he did OK the return of the 350Z sports car, though the initial version had an insultingly cheap interior and serious suspension/tire wear issues...Nissan replaced a lot of tires and did a lot of suspension work under warranty, losing money. And, of course, there was Nissan's well-known money losses from overestimating the residual value of lease vehicles. He did, however, accomplish what he set out to do, albeit with some initially unpleasant results.

First Gen Altima had a very nice interior for the class of vehicle it was in and was praised for it, it was styled somewhat like the Infinti J30 inside and out, 2nd Gen Altima took a nose dive in interior quality and was noticeably cost cut, 3rd Gen Altima I believe was the Ghosn Altima which grew significantly in size from the previous in between size Alitima's, engine grew in size from normal 3 liter in class to 3.5 and power was highest in class, interior was pretty cheap but it was a package Americans liked and they sold a lot. The 3rd Gen was the car that more or less spurned competitors to up their engines to 3.5 liters with more power and grow in size.

I remember first seeing a J30 when I was in high school, walked up to it and checked it out, very impressed and shocked at the design, it was a cream colored one and was very unique. I believe it was based on a Nissan Gloria.Cedric chassis which was smaller then a Q45 or maybe they are related and it was basically a rebadged Nissan Leopard. It only had the base 200hp 300ZX V6 engine in it unfortunately and did not offer the 300hp turbo powerplant or V8 in the US. I think in Japan it might have had a V8 option. It never sold well because it was too cramped in the rear and too small for a mid class competitor and too expensive for a entry level competitor.

I'd give Ghosn 4 out of 10 in the way he ran Nissan. Products under his watch were garbage. Quality sucked. Buddy had a 2007 or 2008 Nissan Frontier with 100k miles on it. Within a year he had to replace the transmission, the radiator, the a/c compressor and the heater core. Always well maintained, great looking truck. Drove really tight and had A LOT of power with the V6. Just under the skin, cost cutting everywhere, mechanically a piece of junk. Ghosn made desirable products like the 2003 Altima, Frontier pickup, Infiniti G35(Infiniti was DOA until they released that car), Murano SUV, 350Z, the GT-R. Its just that once you owned it for a while, they went to ***** from all the cheap components under the hood.

I will give Ghosn some props for reviving Infiniti with the G35. Before that car came along, they were dead in the water with the expensive Q45 that never sold well and 3 poorly done rebadges of other Nissans. That car sold like hotcakes, was great to drive, handled well, FAST, looked great, really kind of shook the market up back in the 2000's.

No.....the Nissan Gloria was the basis for the 1Gen M45, not J30.

I'm starting to think I'm the only one on CL who thought the J30 was atrocious. I have hated that thing since it was introduced.

The first gen Q45 however was lust for me.

Well, like I said earlier in the thread, I thought the styling was awkward, and the rear end looked like an egg compared to the rest of the car. Drove nice, though....mechanically, it certainly was not a piece of junk. But, yes, it was a good example of why Lexus overtook Infiniti in sales back then.

Well, I guess it is kind of like the Lexus designs of today. They are controversial. Some like them, some don't. At the time, I thought it was what a modern Jaguar S-Type should have looked like. Got lots of compliments on it. We all have our own tastes, and that's what makes the world go round.