quote:

Originally posted by P250UA5:
I've always heard that the 6MT in the GTI/R leaves a lot to be desired, compared to the DSG.
I've only got seat time in a few DSG GTI test drives, so I can't comment from personal experience.

Same to be said for cars like the Mistu Evo X. The manual seemed like an afterthought.
Which is a shame, because I loved the few drives I've had in a couple Evo 8 & 9.

In Houston DD traffic, hate to say it but an auto does make it easier.

Meh. Aftermarket bushings, short shifter, etc. I’ve never come across one yet I couldn’t clean up and get to rifle bolt status.

quote:

Originally posted by smlsig:

quote:

Originally posted by chellim1:

quote:

I had a'73 240Z back in the day and truly regret not having it today, what a ride!

I dated a girl who had one... Wow, what a ride!

The car or the girl?

I can say the same but it was a couple years newer Z 260 I think

What a ride they were

Troubled automaker Nissan has a new CEO – but can he do the job?

Mexican Ivan Espinosa has no operational experience – and his board is made up of people from outside the industry

https://asiatimes.com/2025/04/...t-can-he-do-the-job/

Nissan faces a difficult road ahead that includes questions about whether its new CEO, Ivan Espinosa, is up to the task of leading the troubled auto manufacturer and whether its largely non-automotive board of directors is remotely qualified to run a modern auto company.

As things stand now, a week after the 46-year-old executive officially replaced Makoto Uchida, little is still known about Espinosa other than that he is Mexican-born, one of the youngest CEOs in Japanese auto industry history, the second-youngest foreigner, and worked in product planning for most of his career at Nissan including the last eight years in Japan.

In a late-March interview with Automotive News, he came across as affable and bright, but added little to his resume. He drives a Z-car to work. He’s married with two children, plays tennis and golf, but gave little indication about what his duties were as chief planning officer, a position he held between April 2024 and April 2025, or why Nissan’s post-Carlos Ghosn restructuring plan, Nissan NEXT, failed so dramatically.

When Uchida announced the plan in May 2020, he set fiscal 2023 targets of a 5% operating profit margin, a 6% global market share and 4.3 million in global sales.

He also set a sales target of 1 million electric and electrified vehicles.

One year after the plan ended, Nissan’s operating profit margin through December had fallen to 0.5%. Global market share fell to below 4%. To put that in historical context, in fiscal 2017, the final full year of Carlos Ghosn’s tenure at Nissan, global market share stood at 6.2%.

While Nissan succeeded in cutting production capacity to 5.4 million units, it failed dramatically, by more than a million units, to achieve its sales target. Fiscal 2024 plant utilization was 60%, not 80% as promised.

Veteran Tokyo analyst Koji Endo noted that in fiscal 2023, the final year of the Nissan NEXT program, only one of Nissan’s 15 main plants was operating at 80% of utilization.

It is not clear what role Espinosa played in the failed restructuring program — Ashwani Gupta, Nissan’s former COO, served doubly as chief planning officer — but his titles since 2017 as a senior executive in Nissan’s global product strategy and product planning division indicate that he would have been involved.

As one former Nissan executive who’s tracked Espinosa’s career said: “Whether he’s been blocked by others in the organization is not clear. But it’s clear that he didn’t deliver.”

Gupta would be caught up in a scandal reportedly involving a female employee and forced to resign in June 2023.

Other key members of the restructuring team are being removed. Among them: Asako Hoshino, Kunio Nakaguro and Hideyuki Sakamoto. Hoshino was Nissan’s chief brand and customer officer, a position she has held since April 2020. Nakaguro was chief technology officer and Sakamoto was chief monozukuri (roughly, manufacturing and supply chain) officer.

Nakaguro and Sakamoto joined the executive committee with Hoshino in June 2019. Sakamoto was elevated in 2020 to the board, where he’s been in charge of manufacturing and supply chain management.

While the automaker didn’t openly say that the trio was responsible for Nissan’s marketplace failures, people who know them have been hyper-critical of their performance.