If just-auto awarded a prize for most home-page appearances in a week, Nissan-Renault supremo Carlos Ghosn would be this week’s star.
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He’s up there again today telling us (a) that emerging markets are key to automakers’ survivial and (b) that, even if the US isn’t in recession, it’s auto industry sure is.
A few years ago, I saw a TV documentary in which a reporter shadowed Ghosn for a day in Japan when he was running Nissan; he seemed to spend half of his time in a minivan being ferried from one office, plant or R&D centre to another, with the reporter getting a few words from the Great Man on the drive between appointments. And occasionally being chucked out of meetings when they got to the bits Nissan didn’t want the wider world to know just yet.
Ghosn’s comments about emerging markets in South Korea came as, by no coincidence I’m sure, his development and production chiefs were in India inking the deal on a big new greenfield plant near Chennai (once known as Madras in the days of Empire).
This is a sizeable investment which had j-a reaching for the trusty abacus – 4,500 crore rupees is, er, click, click, click, EUR780m or $1.14bn – and will add another 400,000 annual units of installed capacity.
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By GlobalDataIt’ll also give Nissan, primarily, a low-cost export hub in the country, joining the likes of Maruti Suzuki and Hyundai, who ship small cars from there up to us up here in Europe. And further afield. Logan is already being built in India in a JV with Mahindra, we await with interest to see what Nissan builds there.
And all this after Ghosn, just a week ago, said a final tie-up with AvtoVAZ was close. Once the ink’s dry on that, the Alliance will be the world’s third largest automaker, building 7m units a year behind GM and Toyota. Or, more likely, Toyota and GM…
Still with French automakers, we learned today that PSA has had a change of heart on diesel hybrids, deciding that the lack of state funding meant costs would be more easily recovered if the technology was in luxury-segment cars instead of the the C segment (Citroen C4/Peugeot 308), as planned. As we reported last year, EU bureaucrats nosing into the details of the sought state aid, arguing that PSA would be developing the drivelines itself anyway, can’t have helped.
With the Geneva show looming early next month, this was also new-car week – Volvo lifted the veil on its new XC60 crossover, the next step up for C30 buyers, perhaps, Mercedes C-class estates went on sale here in the UK, Fiat announced a sporty 500 Abarth and, though it won’t be at Geneva, Ford Australia announced its locally-developed Falcon.
Enjoy your weekend.
Graeme Roberts
Deputy Editor
just-auto.com
