Nissan and Renault are, for all practical consumer intents and purposes, the same company at this point. So that should mean we’ll be seeing some funky French weirdness over here in America soon, right? Wrong, according to Nissan-Renault CEO Carlos Ghosn.
Ghosn was speaking at the first New York Auto Show press day, where we are today, quietly weeping into a small cup of gray sewage refuse referred to as “coffee.”
And that’s sad! Very sad. I’d love a Nissan Megane R26.R, because who the hell doesn’t want a hatchback with plastic windows and a half-cage? And Alpine is coming back, too, wouldn’t those be great as pseudo-Z cars?
(They would, because that was a rhetorical question and everyone already knows the answer to this. If you say “no,” you are wrong and bad, and need to think about what you’re doing with your life. There are clearly some bad choices being made here. Janet isn’t coming back.)
On the one hand, it’d make a ton of sense for Nissan to sell re-badged Renaults here. All the engineering’s already been paid for and done and Europe, so wouldn’t it be easy to just bring us a new silly Avantime?
Not really. As is our mantra, “American and European regulations are not better or worse than each other, just different, which is very annoying and makes things expensive.”
So at this point, it looks like Nissan’s making the call that it’d just be too expensive to develop cars for both markets.