2009 Nissan Altima Base Sedan 4-door 2.5l on 2040-cars

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Next Nissan Titan will get turbocharged diesel V8 from Cummins

Toyota might be content to eke out an existence in the fullsize pickup market with its lightly refreshed Tundra, but Nissan looks like it'll be a bit more aggressive with its next-generation Titan. The next Titan will make use of a 5.0-liter, turbodiesel V8 from Cummins, the Japanese company announced at the start of its Nissan 360 industry showcase.
Nissan's commitment to a fullsize pickup isn't really open for debate - it made waves back in April when it lured Fred Diaz, CEO of Chrysler's Ram pickup division, down to its Franklin, Tennessee headquarters. But this news of a monster turbodiesel is big. As of this writing, only Ram is set to offer a diesel engine in a non-heavy-duty pickup. Its 3.0-liter, EcoDiesel V6 will arrive in the Ram 1500 in the not-so-distant future, but that engine will still be a far cry from what's promised with this Cummins mill.
The 5.0-liter V8 is expected to generate well over 500 pound-feet of torque - likely closer to 550, based on the language in the press release - along with over 300 horsepower. Those figures aren't just a shot across the bow of Ford, Chevy, GMC and Ram, they're an opening broadside, meant to demonstrate Nissan's willingness with its next light-duty truck. As Diaz said, "There is no question that the new Titan will turn heads, and with the available Cummins 5.0-liter V8 turbodiesel, we expect to win new fans and attract buyers looking for this unique configuration."

Nissan teases New York-bound 2015 Murano

It was over a month ago when we received reports that Nissan would be unveiling the new Murano at the New York Auto Show next month. Now the Japanese automaker has confirmed its imminent arrival, offering up the brief teaser clip below to give us a very faint idea of what to expect.
In announcing the Murano's upcoming debut in Manhattan, the company described the Murano as "the halo vehicle for Nissan's expanding range of bold crossovers and SUVs," previewing the design that will distinguish a whole range of Nissans to follow.
Short of that, we've got little to go on, but we're expecting to see some traits from the Resonance concept of 2013 Detroit vintage finding their way onto the production version of a vehicle that has always been rather stylized from the start. Something (sales figures, perhaps?) tells us that the oddball CrossCabriolet will get lost along the way, not that we'll mind.

Ghosn's legacy: one of the auto industry's most effective execs

"Bob Lutz ... estimated that carrying out the Nissan operation would be the equivalent, for Renault, of putting $5 billion in a container ship and sinking it in the middle of the ocean." So wrote Carlos Ghosn in "SHIFT: Inside Nissan's Historic Revival," which was published in the U.S. in late 2004. Two points about that observation: It is in keeping with Lutz's "Often wrong but never in doubt." It shows that Ghosn is a remarkable executive, given that he was able to take Nissan from the edge of financial oblivion to one of the foremost automotive companies (although with alliance partners Renault and, more recently, Mitsubishi). In 1999, Ghosn created what was named the "Nissan Revival Plan." It could have just as well been called the "Nissan Resuscitation Plan." Things were that bad. Now Ghosn is in the midst of legal trouble, accused of financial improprieties of some sort. There is no indication that this is at anything near the scale of what happened at Volkswagen Group. There's malfeasance. And then there's malfeasance. It is likely that this is going to be the end of Ghosn's career, but at age 64, and as a man who has spent nearly the past quarter-century essentially on airplanes, it is probably a good time to leave the stage. What his next act will be — to court or even prison — is an open question. But arguably, Ghosn's performance in the transformation of Nissan and Renault, which also needed some strong medicine to keep it from collapse in the early '00s (although one suspects that the French government would have done its damnedest to keep it propped up), makes him one of the all-time most-notable executives in the auto industry. Ghosn closed plants in both France and Japan and he worked to dismantle the Nissan keiretsu network of interlocked companies, things that were absolutely unthinkable. He established plans with stretch goals in their titles, like the "20 Billion Franc Cost-Reduction Plan," and worked with his people to achieve them, despite the pushback that seemed to come along with the announcement of the plan. As in, as he recalled in SHIFT, "Some people said, 'He's off the deep end. He's raving mad. Doesn't he know that at Renault you set the most conservative goals possible so you can be certain to reach them?' My answer to that sort of thinking was 'You're going to get what you ask for. If you set the bar too low, you'll be a low-level performance.