That was six months ago. Next week, at the Detroit Auto Show, Nissan plans to raise the curtain on its much-anticipated road rocket. Artists’ renderings of the new Z-car show a low-slung beauty with fat wheels, triangular headlights and a huge rear window that slopes toward a raised tail. Although the performance specs remain top secret, Nakamura has promised a “pure sports car”: fast, nimble and, like the original 240-Z that established Nissan’s image as a cutting-edge car company in the 1970s, a “poor man’s Jaguar” built for a mass audience. “We want people to feel the old DNA,” he says. “We will position the new Z as a symbol of Nissan’s revival.”
The Z, though, is more than a symbol. Nissan is betting nothing less than its future on the new two-seater. After years of declining sales and market share, the company faced bankruptcy when French auto giant Renault took a controlling stake in May 1999. According to the new corporate bosses, Nissan’s chief problem is poor brand identity: not only are the company’s cars and trucks bland, but they don’t look like they belong together. This means, according to the branding experts, customers can’t be sure what they’re getting in a Nissan product.
The Z is intended as a blandness antidote, a clarion call of design inspiration for the entire Nissan fleet of products. In the next three years, Nissan plans to launch 22 new vehicles, everything from mini-cars to sub-compacts to luxury sedans and full-size trucks. Each one will bear design elements introduced next week in the new Z. “Our first message,” says Nissan executive vice president Patrick Pelata, “is that Nissan is back to making new and bold things.”
It falls to Nakamura, 50, the designated architect of Nissan’s revival, to summon up the new and the bold. Nakamura’s personal mission to erase Japan’s reputation for bland cars began in the mid-1990s, when, as Isuzu Europe’s chief designer, he created a radical concept truck, the VehiCross. Its futuristic design melded touring-car comforts with off-road utility, pleased critics and created a new niche in the marketplace: the hybrid SUV. The success got Nakamura promoted to head of Isuzu’s global design team. When Renault bought a stake in Nissan last year and went shopping for a new chief designer, Nakamura jumped off their short list.
“What surprised us most,” says Pelata, “was that he is more Latin than Japanese in his way of communicating.” Translation: he says what he thinks, even if it’s not what others want to hear. In his tastes, he is nothing if not flamboyant. He hates ho-hum cars. His favorite right now is Audi’s TT, a roadster that, he says, borrows its lines from Japanese architecture. Nakamura is out to prove that Japan can lead the world in auto design, rather than borrow from trendsetters in Europe and North America.
Can Nakamura fix Nissan? Some industry watchers are beginning to think he has a shot. Nakamura “knows he has to develop a strong image for Nissan and not just sell hot dogs like the rest of the guys,” says auto consultant Michael Robinet of CMS worldwide in Farmington Hills, Michigan. “Nissan’s renaissance will be led by the Z-car. You need a halo car like that to lead your comeback.”
It is perhaps fitting that Nissan’s revival comes down to the Z–the company’s flagship for 30 years. The original 240-Z made its debut in the 1970 model year. It was Japan’s first sports car: a sexy two-seater with a profile much like the much pricier Jaguar; a powerful six-cylinder engine and a sticker price lower than most American-built hotrods. The success of the Z put Nissan in good stead for the OPEC oil shock of 1973. Sales of its tiny Datsun sedans and trucks were seen as an ecological and (thanks to the Z) hip alternative to Detroit’s gas guzzlers. Nissan commissioned ads from surrealist painter Salvador Dali and psychedelic artist Peter Max with the tag line: own a datsun original.
Meanwhile, in Japan, Nissan was engaged in a fierce sales war with Toyota. For a while the two were neck and neck. In 1972, Nissan’s market share hit 32 percent in Japan–barely two points below Toyota’s. (Today, in contrast, Toyota beats Nissan’s share 46 percent to 17 percent.) Nissan’s rallying cry was: “Win one more month and we’ll be even with Toyota,” remembers Tatsuo Sekine, who worked in Nissan’s advertising department from 1965 to 1975. “When each month’s sales figures were circulated, we’d react as if the Yomiuri Giants had won or lost.”
This single-minded rivalry may ultimately have been Nissan’s undoing: it drove the company to grab blindly for market share with faceless, me-too models while neglecting its successful products. The Micra, a top-selling European subcompact, languished for 9 years without a design change. In 1992, Nissan’s in-house research showed that American consumers wanted a spunky six cylinder engine for the Altima, a mid-sized commuter sedan, rather than its standard four-banger. Nissan still hasn’t obliged–and it won’t until 2001. “This car is one of our biggest volume sellers worldwide,” says Pelata. “That it took nine years to put a new engine in it is scandalous.”
Nissan also missed one of the biggest booms to hit the global auto industry in a generation–the trend toward bigger sedans and full-size SUVs. Instead, it stranded its dealers with cars and vans that, in comparison to the competition, were cramped, slow and boring. Part of the problem was that too many decisions about what cars and trucks Nissan should make were being driven by engineers with too little input from designers and marketing experts. Things got worse after Japan’s bubble economy burst in the early 1990s. To cut costs, Nissan trimmed its R&D budgets and delayed model changes whenever possible. By the end of the decade Nissans were so dull that they sold, on average, for $1,000 less than competitive models.
The Z-car, too, suffered from design drift. With each iteration, the poor man’s Jaguar seemed to get bigger, heavier and more expensive. By 1996, a top-of-the-line version boasted a twin turbo and cost $40,000. Worst of all, this high-octane rocket fell short of U.S. emissions regulations set to take effect in 1998. “Technically, we could have met the higher emissions standards,” says former Nissan engineer John Yukawa, chief product specialist for the new Z-car. “But that would have translated into a higher price.” Rather than clean up the Z, Nissan took it out of production.
At the time the Z-car’s disappearance seemed to foreshadow Nissan’s demise. Staggering under a debt of nearly $20 billion, Nissan avoided this humiliation by selling a controlling 37 percent stake to Renault. Nissan’s new boss, Brazilian-born Carlos Ghosn, slashed production costs and closed factories. (His nickname: “Le Cost Killer”.) In October Nissan reported its best results in a decade: an operating profit of $1.26 billion and gains in market share everywhere but in Japan. “We are on the right track and at an accelerated pace to complete the revival of Nissan,” Ghosn declared.
That revival will ultimately depend on the ability to create inspired cars–a skill Nissan lost, spectacularly, in the 1990s. “Cost cutting is important,” says Christopher Richter, auto analyst at HSBC Securities in Tokyo. “But auto companies live or die on new products. And Nissan needs new products.”
Even before Nakamura was hired, Nissan had restructured its design procedures to shorten command chains and clarify authority with the goal of giving designers more clout. The first result, the trendy Xterra truck, is promising. Introduced in 1999, the company’s newest off-roader boosted U.S. sales by 12 percent in 2000. The truck, a rugged backpack on wheels, is the back-country choice for the young and the extreme. Nissan’s ad for it shows the SUV bounding over rocky terrain as rocker Lenny Kravitz wails, “I’ve got to get away.” “Nissan has become very fashionable with the Xterra,” says auto consultant Wes Brown of Nextrend in Thousand Oaks, California. “They can ride that wave if they continue to bring out cool designs.”
The Xterra marked a departure in the way Nissan goes about designing cars. Rather than shooting for some broad market, Nissan conceived the Xterra for a specific customer: a twenty-something man who can’t afford a full-size SUV but fancies himself needing an off-road vehicle. Establishing this narrow target enabled designers to create a vehicle with style and personality. What does it matter that the typical owner turns out to be a 38-year-old female who makes $80,000 a year? “If you started off looking at what the average demographic would be at the end, is the designer going to make an Xterra? No,” says Thomas Lane, a product developer who helped develop the new Z concept. “Your customer is not an average demographic.”
For its Z-car, Nissan’s designers are aiming at another specific target: a man in his 30s who is married without kids, loves cars and earns at least $70,000 a year. He “feels the [BMW] Z-3 is too feminine and probably wishes he could drive a Porsche,” says Lane, but is also “smart enough to make intelligent tradeoffs.” If all goes according to plan, however, Nissan expects to sell more Z-cars to a second type of buyer who finds this youthful image flattering: well-heeled male boomers in their 40s with high incomes, older kids and a yearning to have fun. Strange as it sounds, Nissan’s market research shows that during the SUV boom in the mid-1990s, many U.S. buyers were trading in sports cars and high-end coupes. Nissan is betting that an affordable Japanese sports car will lure some of them back–and at the same time undercut demand for more expensive Porsches, Audis and BMWs. (Four-cylinder roasters like the Miata, Spyder or S2000 represent a different market segment, in Nissan’s view.) Nissan is mum about how it’ll price the new Z when it is introduced in 2002, but rumors put the figure at $25,000 to $30,000.
In designing the new Z, Nakamura is treading a thin line between nostalgia and novelty. On one hand, it’s important that potential customers recognize the old Z in the new. “We carefully studied the 240-Z in terms of proportion, design and philosophy,” says Nakamura. “I want people to see our new car and say, automatically, ‘That’s the new Z.’ " On the other hand, Nakamura believes going retro (as Volkswagon did with its new Beetle) is a cop-out. Instead, he’s aimed at a thoroughly modern look that communicates three essential attributes: high-tech, mass market and bold.
Like the original, the new Z has a tall rear end, but its hood slopes more smoothly (the old one’s jutted), and overall it is wider and lower than its namesake. In a significant departure from Z tradition, the new car’s front and rear overhangs (the part of the body that sticks out beyond the wheels) are virtually nonexistent. These proportions will carry over to other vehicles that will eventually share the new Z plat-form with other vehicles Nissan is planning.
The real test, of course, is how well Nakamura and his team manage to reflect these design cues in new Nissan products. Without brand cachet, “what’s the difference between Nissan and [South Korea’s biggest carmaker] Hyundai?” ponders one Japanese auto analyst who asked not to be identified by name. The answer: “Nothing.” Nakamura asks his design teams to imagine their cars as members of the same family, then use cues like body shapes, lines and profiles to achieve greater consistency.
One car to watch is the Maxima. Nissan plans to relaunch this luxury sedan in 2003. “The next Maxima and the next Z will have clear [design] links,” Pelata says. The same year, Nissan plans to roll out new trucks and SUVs, and to unveil a prototype “extreme” truck.
Some analysts, however, think Nissan is betting too much on the Z. Since the old Zs were never big in Europe and Asia, it’s unlikely the new ones will make much of a splash. And over the past two decades Nissan’s brand has taken such a beating that it may take considerably longer to turn around than Nissan executives think. “Nothing is more difficult and time-consuming than to change buyers’ attitudes toward a brand,” says Peter Schmidt, editor of the Warwick, U.K.-based newsletter Automotive Industry Data. “It could take as long as a decade. Anyone who thinks styling can turn around Nissan’s image in just two or three years is in cloud-cuckoo land.”
If Nakamura is at all nervous on the eve his career-defining auto show, he doesn’t betray it. In fact, he appears to be having the time of his life. Jon Albert, a GM car designer and friend, remembers Nakamura showing up in Detroit one snowy night in 1999 hours late for a party, then ranting long into the night about Japan’s inability to produce truly original cars. “Japan doesn’t lead in design,” Albert remembers his friend saying. “We just learn design from others and adapt it. I want to elevate Japanese design to a level where we lead.” With Nissan, he’s getting his chance. And thousands of classic Z-car fanatics are cheering him on.
