The Right Color With 40,000 Right Miles For The Right Price !!!! on 2040-cars

Auto blog

Nissan design to show more Chinese influence

Nissan is going to be leveraging the weight of the Chinese market by selling cars influenced by the People's Republic in other markets around the globe. The influence of Chinese design is further proof of the country's importance on a global scale. Nissan isn't the only manufacturer that's looking to leverage China's burgeoning design talent, as BMW, Volkswagen, and General Motors have all set up facilities.
In fact, VW and GM have both used Chinese talent to design cars, in the Passat and Buick LaCrosse, respectively. Nissan has already tested the waters with its Beijing studios, penning the Friend-Me Concept from this year's Shanghai Auto Show. Where GM and VW used their Shanghai-based studios as more consultancies than anything else, though, Nissan is aiming to have the Beijing studio design a global car.
According to Nissan's global design head, Shiro Nakamura, that's already happening. Nakamura told Reuters that Nissan is two years from launching a Chinese-designed global model that will see sales in both North America and Europe, in addition to its home market. While Nakamura wouldn't elaborate on what the new model's styling would entail, there's a focus on what the Chinese call daqi.

Meet Sparky, Nissan's Leaf-based, Frontier-bedded EV parts hauler [w/video]

For many enthusiasts, the concept of the ute - a car with a pickup bed - is somehow irresistibly appealing. On paper, it promises the marriage of a truck's utility and a car's superior driving dynamics, and for that reason alone, we'd love to see more of them. Yet while other parts of the world get them in good numbers, North America doesn't ever see them - at least not for long. Based on what we've seen of late, though, that's not due to a lack of motivation on the part of engineers.
BMW wowed us several years ago with an M3 ute, and earlier this year, some interns converted a Mini Paceman into the pickup-bodied Paceman Adventure. Loathe to let their rivals in Munich and Oxford have all the fun, Nissan has built its very own car-based pickup. Meet Sparky, the world's first Leaf Frontier.
Like the M3, this all-electric ute is used as a parts hauler for Nissan's engineering teams at its sprawling Stanfield, AZ tech center and proving grounds.

Nissan's Carlos Ghosn taps the brakes on autonomous car progress

"Self-driving cars remain a long way from commercial reality."
Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn shocked the automotive industry last year when he announced that his company plans to offer consumers an autonomous car by 2020. The automaker even showed off its self-driving Leaf prototype as proof. He was bolder recently with the pronouncement that select markets could have them in 2018, if laws allowed. The boss' optimism appears to be waning, though, and he's now sounding a lot more conservative about the future. While driverless vehicles are still on the way, Ghosn is hedging his bets with a more gradual implementation of several systems.