“Today’s groundbreaking marks the latest move in our collaboration with Daimler to localize production capacity and enhance our competitiveness in the global market,” said  Mark Swenson, Vice President of Production Engineering and Component Facilities for Nissan Americas.  The facility itself will be built alongside the already working Nissan Powertrain Assembly Complex and will be the first round of Mercedes-Benz engines built-in the  North America Free Trade region.  Production of the high efficiency four will start in 2014 with annual capacity hitting around 250,000 units.  To make sure the engines are pieced together just right, Nissan and Daimler will hire up to 400 new workers who will eventually send of their finished products to the Tuscaloosa, Alabama Mercedes plant.  Official word as to which Infiniti model will get the engine has yet to be released.

Source: Nissan

“With such a strong reaction, and with three genuine offers on the table, we decided we had to make the car a reality,” said Gareth Dunsmore, Marketing Product Manager for the Juke.  When Nissan finished the original car in January, it showcased the lunacy in Dubai which brought more than just shocked reactions.  While at the launch event, serious offers were made to purchase the Juke-R which is why requests will be taken for made-to-order models.  Unlike the first concept, the public Juke-Rs will use the upgraded 2012 GT-R running gear meaning 545 horsepower will be on the table.  As of this writing, Nissan has three vehicles to make and with orders opened for the next four weeks, that number could very well jump up.

“We can’t let down enthusiasts who are this keen to add to their collection of cars. The Juke-R has become something of a phenomenon and I’m enormously proud of the impact it has had,” said Dunsmore.

Source: Nissan

“I’m very pleased to offer the Nissan and Infiniti brands in world-class, state-of-the-art dealerships in San Francisco,” said Penske Automotive Group Chairman Roger Penske. “Our new facilities are unrivaled within the city offering an array of automotive services, including sales, service, parts, vehicle preparation and delivery areas all under one roof.”  Both dealerships include numerous service and detailing bays, hundred-vehicle lots, cutting-edge showrooms as well as LEAF friendly services.  At both the Van. Ness Ave. facilities, nine electric vehicle charging stations will be available.  With other EVs and plug-ins on the horizon for Nissan and Infiniti, this charging trend might just gain some pace in the upcoming future.

Source: Nissan

“We are extremely satisfied with our LEAF sales performance in Norway. In a short period of time LEAF became our second best-selling model, proving that EVs can be valid and competitive alternative to combustion engine cars,” said Pål Simonsen, Country Manager for Nissan Norway.  On April 25, the milestone LEAF found its new owner, Nils Haugerud.  The dealer responsible for the sale was Birger N. Haug, who has managed to unload 550 of the 1,000 cars sold.  Not only does that figure make Haug the best-selling LEAF dealer in Norway, it makes him one of the largest in the world.  One reason for the car’s success in Norway is the country’s extensive infrastructure of EV charging stations.  In Oslo alone, approximately 3,500 stations are available with most of them being free to use by the public.  On top of that, EV buyers rep massive rewards with benefits such as zero VAT, no new car tax, free parking, exemption from some tolls and the use of bus lanes in Oslo. 

Source: Nissan

According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), approximately 918 vehicles are being investigated.  All Titans affected are 2012 model years equipped with the Sports Appearance Package and built from June 10 through July 22, 2011.  In order to fix the issue, the automaker will give owners two options.  One is as simple as having a certified dealer replace the incorrect placard with a new one or, drivers can have a corrected piece shipped to them with instructions on how to install it.  The recall is expected to start on or around May 14 of this year.

Source: NHTSA

“Nissan’s commitment to zero emissions goes beyond the LEAF; we want to help transform global societies to adapt zero emissions vehicles as a way to address environmental concerns and promote energy independence,” said Jon Brancheau, Vice President for Nissan Marketing.  Adopt a Charger is a non-profit organization created to expand the EV market.  With Nissan’s help, the two companies have so far been successful as three Level 2 chargers are working at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and four at the  Music Concourse Garage in Golden Gate Park.  Eight Level 1, 120 volt systems can be found at the San Francisco park as well.  “As our first corporate sponsor we made sure to carefully research the best places to offer Nissan’s adopted chargers,” said Kitty Adams, executive director of Adopt a Charger.

Source: Nissan

AutoTalk.com was given a chance to speak with Brian Carolin, the senior vice president of sales and marketing for Nissan North America during the 2012 NYIAS. The conversation with Brian was very enlightening and included many fun nuggets of information including the possibilty of new SE-R Sentra. We were also able to provide Brian and his team with a valuable business proposition. To read all this more, check out the full transcription of the interview below.

Brian Carolin is the senior vice president of Sales and Marketing for Nissan North America, Inc. (NNA). He oversees all sales and marketing functions for the Nissan and Infiniti divisions. Carolin joined the company more than 20 years ago and served in leadership roles across our operations in the U.K. and the wider European market. Most recently, Carolin served as senior vice president of Sales and Marketing for Nissan Europe, including the launch of the Infiniti brand across Europe. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Politics and Economics from Newcastle University and a Ph.D. from the London School of Economics.

AutoTalk: Good afternoon Brian. A busy day for you it seems.

Brian: Indeed it has been, but it is a good type of busy.

AutoTalk: Well lets begin, then.  The Altima was just revealed. This is a big vehicle for your company. What plans do you have for the vehicle in the future? In the past there have been performance variants of the Altima, such as the SE-R. Do you plan on moving forward with any sort of performance variant with this new generation of Altima?

Brian: No, we don’t. Our great line-up is going to remain pretty much the same as it is today, with largely carry-over pricing, but with a lot more value-added content and features. The car is going to be very competitive, but it is sort of a mainstream bread and butter segment for us. We do expect to increase share, I know our CEO said yesterday, ‘I see no reason why we cannot challenge number one’. We are already outselling the Accord, and we are definitely going to look to increase our volume and our market share.

AutoTalk: Yesterday it was announced that you will have five all-new vehicle coming in before the year-end, one of which is the new Sentra. How big of a car is this going to be for Nissan? Altima is the best-seller, but with gas prices increasing buyers are trending down towards smaller cars. Do you expect this to be a very good car to seize market share with?

Brian: Well even an Altima, we are going to have 38 MPG. On a mid-size sedan that’s pretty extraordinary, best in class. I think Camry is 35 at the moment, highway, so we are going to have a compelling message. So that’s great, but definitely Sentra, that is a segment where, frankly, we have under-performed as  a brand. We believe this next generation Sentra is going to really hit the mark. That is where we are going to get the biggest show in improvement is with that vehicle, simply because we under-perform today. We average about a five-percent segment market share, yet the brand in total we did an 8.2 record last year. We are hitting about a ten-percent share of the D-segment with Altima, so there is a lot of upside, and to your point, it is going to have a great fuel economy message as well. The package itself, and you’ll hear more about it in the coming moths, but, well,  we are very confident that is going to give us a nice bump.

AutoTalk: The Sentra has always been a small yet slightly performance oriented model, especially with models like the SE-R. It was a great way for people who are interested in driving to approach that. Are you guys going to try to pursue something like that again with the Sentra?

Brian: We will in that segment, yes we will. If you look at the way with our Versa sedan, we dominate that segment. We just launched the Versa sedan last year and its a great great car. So we are going to have a very nice three sedan lineup. We are going to have the Versa sedan, the Sentra and of course the Altima.  So the Sentra is going to come out towards the end of this year, so by then I think we are going to be in a really good place.

AutoTalk: Nissan does have a massive presence in Tennessee. How does having such a strong foothold in the Unites States help your business case, and help to attract customers?

Brian: From all the research we have done, I don’t think consumers pay too much attention to where cars are made, but they are very interested in the kind of corporate presence and employment investment. I think the fact that we have a really big factory now in Smyrna (TN) and another one in Mississippi, we have the Decherd Engine Plant in Tennessee as well, and I think the fact that we are now a big employer really does resonate well with the public. I think that is how people interpret car companies. It’s not ‘where is the Versa made?’, but the fact that Nissan is making a big contribution to employment, and I feel that helps build trust and confidence in the brand.

AutoTalk: Another big vehicle Nissan this year is the Taxi of Tomorrow. How much time and effort went into making that vehicle as good as it could be for the Taxi industry?

Brian: Huge. You would not believe.  A lot of support from our engineering teams in Japan, but also from our design studio on the West coast. These guys took apart Crown Victorias to see what was breaking, and it is very important to make sure the durability and quality of the car is there. But we were also looking at some clever design features. We are going to improve the comfort and convenience for all passengers. So things like the huge glass roof, the New York Taxi Commissioner was very keen on making sure that passengers could enjoy the New York skyline, for example. But there are lots of things, like the ability to recharge your cellphone. Convenience features like knee space. There is no transmission tunnel like on the Crown Vic so we have enhanced ease of access. Another big element is we also have special access for disabled people as well. Simple things like the sliding doors; apparently there are a ton of accidents in New York with the doors opening into traffic, or hitting pedestrians and cyclists. So a lot of thought went into the design o f the vehicle, there are some great stories there.

AutoTalk: Do you guys plan on trying to take that project, and the things that you learned from that, and create a niche market vehicle for people who may be disabled drivers and the like? Possibly put that out into the market?

Brian: We haven’t at the moment, no, but that is an interesting thought.

AutoTalk: Well, you are welcome, I guess.

Brian: Yeah, you should licence that. What we are doing is, we are approaching other cities. Boston, Chicago, and we are seeing if they are interested in having the same type of vehicle. London as well, so not just in the US.

AutoTalk: Thank you for taking the time to meet with me, I really appreciate it.

Brian: Of course, Thank you.

Andy Palmer is Executive Vice President and Executive Committee member at Nissan Motor Company Limited, with specific responsibilities for Nissan’s Corporate Planning, Product Planning and Program Management, Global Marketing Communications, Market Intelligence, Global IS/IT and Global Infiniti Business Unit.

For more information about Andy Palmer can be found here.

AutoTalk: Good afternoon, Sir. Thanks for taking the time to meet with me.

Andy: Please, don’t call me sir. I haven’t yet been knighted, and it is my pleasure.

AutoTalk: Let us get started then.

Andy: Let’s.

AutoTalk: The new JX is a very important vehicle for Infiniti. How did this vehicle come to be, and what market is being targeted?

Andy: Product planning is always looking at the white paper and all of the axis, and you look at what your customers are doing. Where the opportunities lie, where the competition is, and the trick with the product planning is to always look where there is the white space. In the case of Infiniti, the demographics of our brand are generally younger than the majority of mainstream luxury. That holds true in the US but it is also especially true outside the US. So often an Infiniti customer is in a life stage where they have a family. So kind of the natural conclusion is that rather than losing them from the brand, why not put something there that is very much a luxury family vehicle. Maybe their first entrance into the brand is a G, or perhaps in the future it will be the entry-level Infiniti from the Etherea Concpet. Then as they get kids and go through that life stage, they could move into the JX, and then you would expect them to move back into an FX or maybe an M depending on their life stage. SO it was basically that thought that steered the opportunity, and clearly for us it is completely incremental. We don’t have anything in that space today, there is no cannibalization, so it is purely conquest, and initial reaction is very very positive.

AutoTalk: In reference to Infiniti having younger buyers. Infiniti makes a dynamic and good-looking vehicle, whereas many of the older luxury marques stick to very staid and bland designs that, while handsome, are very safe.

Andy: I think you are going to see more of that. I took responsibility for Infiniti two and a half years ago. It has been 22 years in existence as a brand in the United States, and it has been through many many transformations. Some good, some bad, so you have a checkered history. When we decided to go outside the United States and make it a global brand, we needed to fix what we stand for. So inspired performance and hospitality is where we go. If I explain that, the inspired performance, it has to drive better than the rest. I’d guess you’d say the reference today in the luxury segment is probably BMW.  So BMW is usually the reference from an inspired performance point of view, but inspired performance needs something else, and we call it hospitality. Hospitality comes in many forms. BMW for example, by their own slogan says that their car is a machine.The natural, as the market leaders, the Germanic design is all machine-like. It’s all straight lines, it’s all beautifully executed, but if I was being controversial, I’d say soulless. You could look at the other Japanese competitors and you can say that they looked at the space and they followed suit, and in many cases they have created better cars. What we have done, is we said we want to be different.  We want curved lines. We want the cars to be seductive, sexy erotic. We want them to be humanistic. We want them to have this welcoming atmosphere. They also should be animal like and that by nature means the styling tends to be more fluid, more aggressive and in consequence, appeals to a younger customer.

AutoTalk: Being younger, I am a fan of Infiniti design. When I see a German make, I don’t feel drawn to it.

Andy: Wait until you see the next G. The next G, which is not that far away, I can’t tell you when it is, but it does define the characteristic of the brand. You can get hints of it by looking at the Essence and the Etherea, and I don’t know if you saw the Emerg-E that was shown in Geneva, but that is the design language we are talking about. You should see that flavor come out more and more as we introduce the cadence of new vehicles. That is what will define the brand. Then the point is that it’s Marmite, do you have Marmite in the US? Anyway, you either love it, or you hate it. It is supposed to be controversial. We ar not looking at the Mercedes-Benz customer, we are looking at a much younger audience, much sportier, and our intention is to catch the customer as the move up from the mass market and into the luxury, and bring them into the brand.

AutoTalk: We know that Infiniti is looking to bring in a smaller market segment item. Where would that be positioned, and is Infiniti looking to attack the market of the Volvo C30 or perhaps Acura’s new ILX?

Andy: Well the segment… actually I will be more specific, we are attacking BMW 1 and Audi A3. That’s globally where the mass is. Clearly it is the core of the market in Europe, but it is an emerging market around the world, but if you just do it is the same way what is compelling over an Audi A3? So the Etherea gives you some concept of where we are going with our play there. It is an interesting point because, as you know, we borrow many components and platform parts from Mercedes-Benz. So it comes with all the credibility of an A-class, B-Class architecture, but with a very different tune and a very very different style and feel.

AutoTalk: I know it makes sense from a costs-of-scale standpoint to move a lot of the technology Nissan has pioneered with the Leaf up into the Infiniti brand. How do you plan on marketing the new Infiniti LE against the market competitors? Seeing as there is not a true competitor for that type of vehicle, how well do you think it will do in the market?

Andy: There is not a competitor for that vehicle. It is clearly luxury. It is clearly more expensive than the Leaf. You could argue some internal competition because most of the buyers of the Leaf are something like 8o-percent conquest, and generally have a very high income. You could say their more normal choice could probably be an Infiniti. But you are right, today there really is not a competitor. The nearest competitor to us is probably BMW with their I-Series. Come back to the target customer of Infiniti, younger and with a much greater feeling of social responsibility, than probably their parents. As they have come through school there has been global warming, or fears of global warming, probably educated since your first days in infant school, and the car was the symbol of badness. So those guys are now coming to a position where they can afford to make a choice. And generally speaking, what I expect to happen, they probably already an M or and FX, and they will buy this in the first instance and a second car in the garage, a car for the school run or whatever. What will happen in reality, is that it will end up becoming the primary car for the family. The reality is that the greater American public doesn’t do about more than 25 or 30 miles a day, so from a practicality point of view this will become the primary car, and then they will use the FX or the M or the G as the car on the weekends when you want to go on longer distances. So that is where I generally see the dynamic. Now what you will see is that whilst that car borrows technology from Leaf, it is executed in a very very different way. Leaf is a hatchback, that’s (LE) a sedan.  By nature a hatchback has a high hip-point, stands high, and it makes it a really crap starting point for a sedan which is going to be low and sleek. So the challenge for the engineers and designers is to borrow what you can from the Leaf, but at the end of the day it needs to be a beautiful sedan. Then on top of that is what are the new technologies you want to embed. For example, people hate going to the gas station. Plugging in your car at the end of the day is a lot better than ever going to a gas station, but not having to plug in your car at all, just parking over an inductive charger, is even better.

AutoTalk: When it comes to inductive charging technology, do you see a time in the near future where we could embed that sort of technology into tires and roads so that when you are in a major city, or on a major roadway, that your car will stay perpetually charged.

Andy: It is definitely possible, you can do it in a laboratory. Is it going to happen very soon? I don’t think so. It means tearing up the road systems, and putting special lanes in place and all the rest of it. There are certainly some technological issues, you don’t get perpetual motion for sure, but quick charging…. What you see today is slow charging, you plug it in for eight hours or so, but quick charging is around the corner, relatively speaking, and definitely doable as long as regulation changes to allow you to do it. Continuous charging is the holy grail, and technically possible. What you’ll then get into is the debate about do I do fuel cell, or do I do embedded EV? Both require big investments in infrastructure, and its a bit of a race on that technology, frankly speaking, no matter which way you go, and we have bet on both.

AutoTalk: It has been wonderful, I really appreciate your time.

Andy: It has been my great pleasure.

Like most NV offerings, the Passenger Van comes in a number of trim levels; three to be exact.  Following the base S is the SV which is superceded by the top-of-the line SL.  Just as before, Nissan’s latest commercial van can be motivated by two engines, both of which have proven their muscle.  Out-of-the gate power for both the S and SV is the 4.0 liter version of the DOHC VQ V6 engine. Spinning the rear wheels of the six cylinder NVs is 261 horsepower and 281 lb-ft of torque via a heavy-duty five speed automatic transmission.  For the SL, the Titan donates its 317 horsepower and 385 lb-ft of torque 5.6 liter DOHC V8.  When the given the task of hauling up to 12 people and their stuff, all NV Passenger Vans are 3500 rated, meaning a fully-boxed ladder frame and leaf-sprung solid rear axle. 

Nissan’s full pricing list for all 2012 NVP 3500s is listed below.

Source: Nissan

The reveal was made by Nissan’s CEO, Carlos Ghosn, who went on to mention that there will be a generous investment into the specific market.  According to an Automotive News article, by 2015, the automaker looks to have 150 dealerships in Southeast Asia, double the employees and a Datsun branded car for sale.  When Nissan disbanded the secondary name worldwide in the 1980s, the world expected to only see Datsun again in history books.  Born in 1932, the name and company was purchased by Nissan a year later and continued on for 50 years.  In a decision to make the Nissan name truly worldwide, Datsun was simply switched and with other manufacture’s recent use of nostalgia, the Japanese automaker might strike a chord with its revival. 

Source: AutomotiveNews.com