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Nissan has said it will add self-driving abilities to the vast majority of its cars and cut a fifth of its models in the latest stage of the Japanese carmaker’s drawn-out turnaround efforts.
Ivan Espinosa, Nissan’s chief executive, said the company was pinning its hopes on “AI-defined vehicles”, with an aim of installing autonomous driving technologies on 90% of its vehicles in the future.
The carmaker endured years of turmoil under a succession of bosses. Espinosa took over last year and has set about a painful programme of seven factory closures and 20,000 job losses in an effort to cut costs.
On Tuesday he announced at an event at Nissan’s headquarters in Yokohama, Japan, that the company would reduce the number of cars it made from 56 to 45 models in order to divert investment to more profitable models.
“Our performance pressures emerge from structural challenges compounding over time,” Espinosa said. “Our portfolio aged faster than the market, costs rose faster than volumes, fixed costs and complexity remain high, even as scale declines.”
Nissan and other traditional carmakers have struggled with the need to invest in new battery electric technologies. Mid-sized Japanese manufacturers in particular have failed to keep up with the pace of change from Chinese manufacturers, who have rapidly become the world’s leading producers of electric cars.
Nissan also revealed its new battery electric Juke, a previously announced crossover SUV to be built in Sunderland, northern England. It will play an important part of its electrification plans in Europe.
However, Nissan said that its main markets would be Japan, the US and China, and reaffirmed its commitment to hybrids, which combine a petrol engine with a smaller battery. It revealed a new hybrid Rogue SUV (known as the X-Trail in some places) targeted at the US market, where Donald Trump has torn up incentives to shift to electric cars.
The fast rollout of self-driving abilities will be a key part of Nissan’s efforts to increase sales in Japan by 550,000 a year by 2030, and to reach 1m apiece in the US and China. The self-driving push is likely to benefit Wayve, the British AI startup that signed its first technology deal with Nissan a year ago.
Masahiro Akita, an analyst at Bernstein, a research business, said the plans were reasonable, but he added: “Amid ongoing macro uncertainty, it remains unclear whether Nissan can deliver sustained top-line growth and achieve a genuine turnaround.”
