How Nissan and Honda's $60B merger talks collapsed • Hacker News Board

Re: How Nissan and Honda's $60B merger talks collapsed

#241

Post by JohnBooty » Thu, Feb 13, 2025, 1:22 PM UTC

VectorLock wrote: post #9

bearjaws wrote: post #2

IMO a Honda Nissan merger would have been terrible for Honda. Nissan is clearly an anchor, and acquiring it would have just dragged Honda down .

Its too bad since Honda has seemed to have totally lost its luster the past decade or so. Honda was Apple to Toyota's Microsoft for a long time, now their cars are bland and undifferentiated, rather than the innovative leaders they used to be.

From my consumer's perspective: amen. At least in the US they were always "like Toyota, but a bit more fun."

I have a friend who worked for Honda as an engineer in the past decade and he concurred. He said the goal was seemingly to make everything as "mid" as possible.

Their utter snoozing on the hybrid/EV game is baffling. I am not sure how much of that was a failure to see the future, and how much of that was (perhaps?) due to Toyota snapping up a bunch of patents on basic concepts.

My extremely loose understanding is that you can't realistically build a hybrid without licensing a bunch of Toyota's patents, but, I could be wrong. (I mention it in the hopes that somebody with actual understanding can confirm or correct)

Re: How Nissan and Honda's $60B merger talks collapsed

#242

Post by thedrbrian » Thu, Feb 13, 2025, 1:24 PM UTC

VectorLock wrote: post #76

killerpopiller wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

habe you seen the Honda e?

Its cute but not particularly exciting in my opinion, what do you think?

and it's not a tenth as good looking as the concept

Re: How Nissan and Honda's $60B merger talks collapsed

#243

Post by mauvehaus » Thu, Feb 13, 2025, 1:37 PM UTC

VectorLock wrote: post #186

JamesSwift wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uhh, the Odyssey is still best of breed for minivans in the price segment.

Yet still bland and undifferentiated and a minivan.

I'm not personally convinced that minivans lend themselves to much differentiation. They all hold about seven people, and more dollars gets you more screens.

It's a box on wheels that gets seven people from point a to point b. The screens help stupify the kids in the back to make the journey quieter for the adults in the front. Nobody is shopping by zero-sixty times, the maintenance intervals are all about the same, and they all fit roughly the same amount of stuff.

The most differentiation you're likely to find is that one or two will fit a sheet of plywood in the back, which is admittedly a pretty fringe thing to differentiate on, and frequently only matters to the second owner who is a tradesperson who doesn't want a full-sized van and doesn't mind a few stains from the kids who used to ride around in the back eating their breakfasts.

Ironically, the Honda Odyssey used to be differentiated by having regular doors in the back instead of sliding doors. They clearly decided that that wasn't an advantageous differentiator, and went to sliding doors after just four years.

Re: How Nissan and Honda's $60B merger talks collapsed

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Post by darkerside » Thu, Feb 13, 2025, 1:47 PM UTC

Gud wrote: post #179

alexey-salmin wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, the Renault Logan (and the B platform in general) was extremely good from the engineering standpoint. Cheap, reliable, easy to maintain, easy to fix. The technical competence in building gasoline cars was definitely there. They missed the electric wave sure, but as with any innovations the more competent you are in the previous wave of technology the harder it is to switch to the new one. But it's a dif…

>They missed the electric wave sure, but as with any innovations the more competent you are in the previous wave of technology the harder it is to switch to the new one. But it's a different kind of problem. I disagree with this statement. The greatest engineer, scientist and inventor of all time, Stanford Ovshinsky, absolutely had no problem excelling in any field he put his mind to.

It's incontrovertibly true at the organizational level, not necessarily the personal. Individuals can be polymaths, and I would posit that success in one domain can actually predict success in others.

Organizations OTOH typically develop inertia when it comes to their goals and purpose. Any change takes time to communicate through the organization for one thing. People are conditioned to push the Pavlovian success buttons of the past, for another. Managing budgets, stakeholder expectations, and the disconnect between leadership and the ground level are a whole other class of issues.

Re: How Nissan and Honda's $60B merger talks collapsed

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Post by idiotsecant » Thu, Feb 13, 2025, 1:55 PM UTC

Gud wrote: post #209

mashepp wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The greatest engineer, scientist and inventor of all time, Stanford Ovshinsky, absolutely had no problem excelling in any field he put his mind to. So, because the greatest engineer according to your words excels at something. So it's easy for everybody to do the same?

”the most competent”. Possibly there was a smarter mechanical engineer than Mr. Ovshinsky, it would be hard for anyone to argue he wasn’t in the top 0.1% in his field(s). Why a top engineer in the field of making petrol powered cars shouldn’t be able to quickly learn a “new field”, using quotation marks here because electric cars have been around for >100 years, is beyond my understanding.

Do you think individual technical contribution is the hardest part of retooling an entire industrial supply chain? Making a car is easy.

Re: How Nissan and Honda's $60B merger talks collapsed

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Post by neogodless » Thu, Feb 13, 2025, 2:02 PM UTC

phs318u wrote: post #116

Reubachi wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TLDR; Mazda should merge with Nissan while they still can do it on a fire sale. Mazda is a huge outlier in manfacturing because they are small, but have motorsports calibre/history (meaning they have a history of homologating sports cars.) Mazda sells an order of magnitude less cars than even newer companies like BYD. Even less than isuzu. Because of this, they can more tightly control investor expectations, profit/l…

> Mazda sells an order of magnitude less cars than even newer companies like BYD. In Australia, Mazda has been the 2nd highest selling brand (across all models) for a number of years. Not sure about last 18 months.

I think U.S.-centric readers may misunderstand Mazda. When I was in Singapore, I saw one example of them being quite popular abroad. In the U.S., they seem to be more of an enthusiast / novelty brand.

Last January, I threw Car & Driver stats for 2023 and 2022 best-selling models (from U.S. sales) in a spreadsheet. Mazda was the #12 OEM here, just below Hyundai. (Note this is only based on top 25 models.)

EDIT: Updated to add 2024 top 25.

In 2024, Mazda's CX-5 dropped off the top 25 best-selling, removing it from my spreadsheet.

03. Honda 807,519 11.8%

07. Nissan 398,383 5.8%

In 2023 Mazda increased their volume very slightly, while Nissan lost share, and Honda increased their share.

2023

03. Honda 759,785 11.1%

10. Nissan 271,458 4.0%

12. Mazda 153,808 2.3%

2022

04. Honda 526,699 8.6%

08. Nissan 326,435 5.3%

12. Mazda 151,594 2.5%

Re: How Nissan and Honda's $60B merger talks collapsed

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Post by unyttigfjelltol » Thu, Feb 13, 2025, 2:07 PM UTC

thuddrff567gg wrote: post #93

csours wrote: post #5

At this point I feel like a rising stock price after a crisis should be a major red flag for long term corporate survival. Carlos Ghosn was able to "turn Nissan around", but it was at the expense of future product capabilities (in my opinion) [Disclosure I work for GM, this is solely my own opinion] Also, I must say that it is not clear to me that anyone could know what a long term winning play looked like 10-15 year…

This seems to be the classic way in which management types destroy technical companies. Same thing happened a decade back in electronics companies in Japan (Sony comes to mind). Technical competence is generally very hard to judge and often even harder replace. It's not surprising that the same management types are salivating at the thought of replacing people with AI.

> Technical competence is generally very hard to judge

At an end-user level it always was easy to judge that Honda was at the top for technical competence. The same it true for judging the bottom rung. You can judge by favoring high quality products, or by disfavoring businesses that try to sell you on sizzle and "fun". It's all the same.

Re: How Nissan and Honda's $60B merger talks collapsed

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Post by rightbyte » Thu, Feb 13, 2025, 2:15 PM UTC

panick21_ wrote: post #238

jorvi wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Leaf 2 was and is a very good EV for its price point. Its weird how Toyota had the first mass-market PHEV with the Prius but got hyperfixated on hydrogen cars, and Nissan had one of the most successful BEVs (Leaf 2, maybe even Leaf 1) and just sort-of gave up. I vaguely remember Honda having a decent EV. I wonder what makes EVs so antithetical to Japanese car companies..

All of Japan got obsessed with they whole 'hydrogen economy' nonsense. This was just the generally agree on 'future' of the economy. In my opinion this is complete nonsense and after decades very little has happened. Even for planes I don't think its the future. Just going one step further and making SAF is just a better plan. With hopefully more trains, and electric planes for many shorter routes.

At the time hydrogen was not nonsense. Good lithium batteries happened.

Hydrogen is very impractical. Leaks easely and the pressure involved is scary. It is no surprise that good alternatives more or less scrapped the whole thing.

Re: How Nissan and Honda's $60B merger talks collapsed

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Post by robin_reala » Thu, Feb 13, 2025, 2:15 PM UTC

killerpopiller wrote: post #74

VectorLock wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its too bad since Honda has seemed to have totally lost its luster the past decade or so. Honda was Apple to Toyota's Microsoft for a long time, now their cars are bland and undifferentiated, rather than the innovative leaders they used to be.

habe you seen the Honda e?

I would have bought one had it even had a 50kwh battery, but 35kwh made it just dead in the water to me unfortunately.

Re: How Nissan and Honda's $60B merger talks collapsed

#250

Post by Toutouxc » Thu, Feb 13, 2025, 2:17 PM UTC

protocolture wrote: post #119

crowcroft wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

New car purchasing behaviour follows the law of double jeopardy. ie. Toyota has high repeat purchase rates because it has high market share, not because of loyal customers.

At least until the last 10 years people would try and sell Toyota on safety and reliability. People who wanted to extract every cent out of the cars life would get a toyota because it would legit go the distance without failure. Dealer told me that it doesnt hold true anymore due to electronics. But old corollas are still legendarily reliable first cars for teenagers. And I recall the used market for old hiluxes is b…

> it doesnt hold true anymore due to electronics

I'm only in my thirties, but I've been hearing this exact (!) sentence, about every single brand, throughout my entire life. Surprisingly, most of the brands are still fine and selling cars.