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Originally Posted by ASAP
100% should be done with... and with Nissan's recent performance this would not surprise me at all.
I recall when an Infiniti G was THE CAR to have... the first RWD SUV they made was also great... now it's a rebadged group of Nissans...and when I say rebadged I mean same horrible interior / infotainment built on FWD platforms... a joke at best...
Come to think of it... how does Acura still exist?
Come to further think of it... Where do you think Lexus would be without the RX, NX, UX and ES? Basically, the upsell Toyota crowd?
I think the Japanese car industry died as a frontrunner somwhere around 10 years ago and simply stopped developing ahead instead decided on reproducing the same tired designs over and over... Only Toyota can get away with that simply because I believe their crowd is extremely simple minded when it comes to cars...(even their sole perfomance car is... a BMW). I think Mazda is the most innovative Japanese car brand and unfortunately it doesn't get the praise it deserves.
It took the Japanese 10 years to build the LFA and they've been making the GTR 10 years straight now... think about that vs what's been happening in Germany.
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To paraphrase Mark Twain, the reports of the death of the Japanese car industry are greatly exaggerated.
From a performance & technology perspective, the Germans are ahead but in terms of sales revenue (i.e., what really counts to survive), Toyota recently took over as the #1 brand in the world, ahead of the top German brands, VW (which includes Audi, Porsche and others) and Daimler. Honda sits around #6 and Nissan has dropped but still ranks near BMW in the world at the tail end of the top 10.
Sales speaks volumes. It's not a coincidence that BMW has been moving away from it's heritage as performance cars to something more softer, more road isolation... more like Japanese cars, and the result has been BMW has had record sales (pre-COVID) recently year-over-year.
As for Infiniti, in the US market, sales peaked in 2017 at ~150K vehicles and dropped to 118K in 2019. So, they are in a slump but it does not point to killing off the brand unless this slump continues for a few more years, at least.