Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Transportation Businesses Japan

Japan's Honda and Nissan To Reportedly Begin Merger Talks (cnbc.com) 64

Posted by BeauHD from the rapidly-changing-industries dept.
Japanese automakers Honda and Nissan are reportedly in merger talks to form a holding company, potentially integrating Mitsubishi Motors to compete with industry giants like Toyota and Volkswagen. CNBC reports: The combined Nissan-Honda-Mitsubishi enterprise would equate to more than 8 million vehicle sales annually, according to Nikkei. That would place the company among the world's largest automakers, but still below fellow Japanese automaker Toyota Motor, at 11.2 million in 2023, as well as German automaker Volkswagen, which last year reported sales of 9.2 million vehicles.

The merger report follows the two Japanese automakers entering into a strategic partnership earlier this year on shared automotive components and software. Such a tie-up would be the largest automotive industry merger since Fiat Chrysler joined with France-based PSA Groupe to form Stellantis in January 2021. Honda and Nissan said in similar statements: "The reported content was not released by our company," Honda said. "As announced in March of this year, Honda and Nissan are exploring various possibilities for future collaboration, leveraging each other's strengths. We will inform our stakeholders of any updates at an appropriate time."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Japan's Honda and Nissan To Reportedly Begin Merger Talks More

Japan's Honda and Nissan To Reportedly Begin Merger Talks

Comments Filter:

  • Remember... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Valgrus Thunderaxe ( 8769977 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2024 @05:49PM (#65020737)
    There was a time, not that long ago (~2000, in the Year of Our Lord), where Honda had the NSX, S2000, Prelude, Civic and Del Sol Si and Integra Type-R all in their catalog, at the same time.

    Just let this FACT sink in, for just a minute, and contemplate how the MIGHTY have fallen.

    • Just let this FACT sink in, for just a minute, and contemplate how the MIGHTY have fallen.

      It wasn't long after that, somewhere around 2006(?), where the quality of Honda vehicles fell off. It came down to beancounters trying to scrape a penny or two here and there. The insides of those vehicles looked and felt like plastic and didn't have much in the way of aesthetics. I had to drive one while my car is in the shop, and even though I was driving a ten year old Honda, mine felt and looked better than the l

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward
        That's just ignorance. I can tell you Honda is still run by engineers. I'm not claiming cost plays no part but Honda has to get very creative to keep price increases to a minimum while still putting out quality products.

        There have been some design misses, the Civic a couple generations ago to be specific, but the feedback was well received and was refreshed 2 model years later.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Honda has been struggling to make the transition to EVs. Nissan started well but haven't put enough effort into keeping current. Maybe together they can get back on track.

      The Ariya is a great car. They just need more EV models. Honda's e was the best HMI on the market, but the follow up e:NY1 or whatever it's called is a very mediocre EV.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mccalli ( 323026 )
        The Honda e [wikipedia.org] (which looks a lot better in reality than it does in those photos) could have caught on if they'd put just a bit more effort into the range or alternatively found a way to make it cheaper.

        Shame really - that one had potential that never really came to fruition. I see a black one daily in London, always looks good.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          With the available discounts it wasn't massively overpriced... But yeah, if they had done a bigger battery version, or just made a slightly bigger car with the same design, it would have been great. The e:NY1 is such a big step back.

      • "transition to EVs" and "keeping current"

        These two phrases in one sentence - touché!

        And the "on track" train metaphor to boot!!

    • NSX was beautiful but sold few units on account of being very expensive.

      S2000 was beautiful but had an open rear diff and raised a rear wheel off the ground during hard cornering, what a piece of shit.

      All those other cars are wrong wheel drive.

      At one time, not all that long ago (~2000 as well) Nissan had the Silvia (best drift car of all time), Skyline (the Battle King) and the 300ZX (pretty heavy, but it could keep its wheels on the ground) as well as the Sentra SE-R all at the same time.

      Cry not for Honda,

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by fjo3 ( 1399739 )
      2000 ITR owner here. #1355. The golden age of Honda is over, and I'm a Toyota man now, but I sure miss the Honda of the 1980s through the early 2000s. That era is not coming back, but it was an exciting time to be an affordable car enthusiast! I'm lucky to be alive - I used to regularly take my Integra all the way to bouncing off of the redline in 5th gear, 145 mph, on deserted highways. The B18C5 is a hell of a great engine.

    • Honda have a fundamental problem with the energy transition. They are not a car company. They are an engine company. If it explodes an oil based product in a small cylinder then Honda make it. Motorcycles, lawnmowers, leaf blowers, V8 outboards on a speed boat, heck they even dabbled in aircraft. Their cars were never amazing, but wow did they make good engines.

      But engines are precisely what the world is turning away from in cars. It stands to reason that a company that isn't a car company at heart wouldn't

  • so really hoping this fallls through. I swear Nissan's the Japanese AMC, given that every company that buys AMC turns to garbage.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dfghjk ( 711126 )

      How many companies have bought Nissan? I fail to see any analogy here at all.

      For that matter, how many companies bought AMC? One? And Jeep worked out pretty well for them.

      Nissan is up and down, they seem to suffer from not knowing how to sustain success or present a consistent marketing image. Honda may be good for them.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by vivian ( 156520 )

        Don't know about companies, but my far the most fun car to drive I ever had was around 2000, when I owned a GTR33 v spec that I imported from Japan to the UK, which was only surpassed by my CBR900 motorcycle for grin factor when touring europe and especially on the autobahn.
        If they had better security installed in that I might still own it. Sadly it was stolen while I was away in Aus one Christmas and probably ended up in Russia before I even knew it was gone.

        On the other hand my brother's manual Nissan X-

  • Is this the Japanese ver. of Boeing Mcdonnell? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Nissan is crap, and they tried to imprison their CEO under pretty poorly evidenced charges.

  • Ghosn was the drive for Nissan's successes. Getting rid of him meant Nissan struggling, but the Japanese government wanted Nissan to forever be Japanese.

  • Nissan has been in my driveway for basically all of my adult life. I had a 1993 Pathfinder, 1994 Pathfinder, 2003 Pathfinder, 2012 Armada, and a 2017 Titan XD.

    Nissan has taken some missteps along the way for sure. Transitioning Pathfinder from a Truck body to a Unibody, and then to a glorified Altima chassis, was a good example. The latest rendition of the Pathfinder "CarUV" looks good, but still is nothing like the Pathfinders of yore which actually had good off-road capabilities and true four wheel drive.

  • The badge on the back of their vehicles would say DATSUN, by Nissan.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Temkin ( 112574 )

      The 240Z's & 260Z's were staples at my high school for the kids that couldn't afford the drying up 60's muscle cars. Nice tourquey inline 6 and a manual...

      I ended up with a 40hp VW with a 6v electrical system... At least it was easy to convert to 12v.

      • The 240Z(VG) with the dual carbs was just as fast as the Corvette and handled better for half the money. It had half the power, but it also had half the weight. The 260Z was a bit of a lemon, though, which is why you hardly ever see one any more. Then the 280Z was good again but they had squandered their good name by that point, and then they made the 280ZX which was goofy due to the back seat space. Kind of looked like a child's 80's styled rendition of a jag shooting brake because of the proportions. I ha

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Temkin ( 112574 )

          Today the 240Zs and the VWs from back then are mostly rusted out, neither one had high quality corrosion protection.

          I remember the 240Z were quite fun. The 260Z's didn't seem to last long. I didn't know why at the time.

          I still have a '71 super under restoration. No rust. Runs, can be driven around the block. The interior is all tore up, and I can't find skinny 165/15 tires anymore. Probably going to have to go to Coker. One of these days the tech world will be done with me, and I'll have time to work on it...

          • I'd really like to get a 280Z with a four speed and swap a 280ZX five speed into it... I never see 280Zs any more either, though. I hope they're hiding in the midwest.

  • Unless they are selling huge numbers of cars in markets outside the US, they are already in a death spiral. I drive quite a bit for work and it's rare that I see 2 Mitsubishis of any model in 24 hours. Back in the 90s you could barely turn around without seeing an Eclipse somewhere; but they killed it off (the "Eclipse Cross" doesn't count at all; it's a four-door compact crossover) a few years back now. The "Evo" series sedans were cool competitors to the Subaru WRX but they are all but extinct as well.
    • Here's a nice pie chart. North America makes up 20% of their sales.

      https://www.mitsubishi-motors.... [mitsubishi-motors.com]

      • Thank you for finding that. Those end up being rather frightening numbers then for them. Mitsubishi likely didn't sell more than a hundred cars in my state the past 12 months (that's likely a very generous rounding up there), and we tend to be close to the median in car sales here. That might put the total annual volume of Mitsubishi cars at around 3,000 cars for the country all year. They are very nearly extinct in Canada as well.

        If we even said they sold 5,000 cars in our entire continent - which

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jonwil ( 467024 )

      Mitsubishi sells some decent vehicles here in Australia. The Triton pickup truck, Pajaro Sport off-roader and their range of SUVs (including their plug-in hybrid SUVs) are decent quality and sell fairly well (better quality than what Nissan is selling that's for sure).

    • Now can Nissan be useful?

      Yes. They have gone through the process of learning how to make EVs, and Honda hasn't. The Leaf only had a lousy battery, and the Ariya is supposedly quite good in general.

      I think a better buyer for the two could be Sony. The best known cars from Nissan and Mitsubishi are both popular with video game fanatics. Sony could possibly resurrect them with special gamified features to bring buyers to dealers.

      There will never be another Nissan Skyline worthy of the name. There might be a reasonable Silvia successor, though.

  • So they will basically cannibalize each brand’s sales in a death spiral until the combined company is back to being the size of what each was prior to merger. And since they’ll be in reverse momentum they will shrink into bankruptcy. The only question is will Detroit companies beat them to bankruptcy?

  • After around 20 years of driving Porsche I moved to a Nissan 350Z, a nice car but the road holding could not match a 15 years older Porsche, only the 370Z became the nice driver I had expected.
    Later I've had several other model Nissan's, all were reliable cars and presently I have the Ariya because I feel it is time for non-ICE, it is a nice car but the resale value of all EV's is bad so I'll keep it.

    One reason for a possible merger is Nissan that has financial problems.

    Once they were at the forefront
    • Nissan Execs want to get out from Renault. As alluded by others kind of to late. Honda does not need Nissan baggage unless they get it for a fire sale prices. Just buy IP like the scrapping of Motorola phone division. Nissan brand brings little. Some good engineers, technicians could be hired but seems a fair amount of duplication. If Renault wants to hold out for an unrealistic offer drop the talks.

  • VW is going down the drain, soon to be an EX-industry giant.

  • Honda has a near unmatched reputation for reliability. Any other brand (excepting Toyota) would bring its standards down.

  • The only acceptable moves

    1. Let Nissan die. Completely. They did this to themselves and it has nothing to do with China. It has everything to do with basically doing the same thing that brought about the 2008 crash -- sellign cars to people with no means of support.

    2. Let Honda buy Nissan, fire all of management, and roll Nissan into Honda. The reverse of what happened to Boeing.

    The worst possible outcome would be Honda management parachuting out with huge golden 'chutes while the Nissan nupties take

  • The combined Nissan-Honda-Mitsubishi enterprise would equate to more than 8 million vehicle sales annually, according to Nikkei. That would place the company among the world's largest automakers, but still below fellow Japanese automaker Toyota Motor, at 11.2 million in 2023, as well as German automaker Volkswagen, which last year reported sales of 9.2 million vehicles.

    And the world's most valuable automotive company [tesla.com]? 1,808,581 vehicles.

    But of course, they're not a car company, they're a robotics/AI compan

  • Now, Honda has become the Oldsmobile of Japanese cars. Four-door Civic Si? Making the nimble sporty CRX into the the CRZ, which of course failed, as no one wanted a slow little car. No replacement for the Prelude or Integra or RSX? Brand new, I would rather have the old NSX than the new one.

Slashdot Top Deals

We are not a loved organization, but we are a respected one. -- John Fisher

Close