The conversation at the dinner table was on the verge of becoming heated. My colleagues and I were grilling a NISMO marketing man about the sub-brand and its core values. ‘NISMO is the ultimate expression of the Nissan brand,’ we’d been told.
Its relaunch
in the UK draws on decades of motorsport heritage and the more recent video game fame with advanced technology, dynamic design and an exciting driving experience at its core.
Is this the NISMO the Gran Turismo gen dreamed of?
It all sounds rather promising, but when we consider that Nissan launched the brand first with a lightly breathed upon
Juke variant
a pricier 370Z
that struggles to justify its £10,000 premium, we can only conclude that the new look NISMO isn’t everything we hoped it would be.
When product men get bogged down in inconsequential details during flashy PowerPoint presentations you fear that they don’t have anything really substantial to discuss. The Juke NISMO, we now know, has contrasting stitching and a red band atop the steering wheel.
While some within Nissan seem determined to tout the NISMO brand as the full performance package, the reality is that feels more like a marketing exercise than an engineering-led sub-brand with origins in maverick engineers and skunk works projects.
370Z lives the NISMO dream, at a cost
“NISMO isn’t necessarily for petrolheads,” says marketing manager Edgard Rodriguez, “but for people who want sportier styling and performance without compromising on fuel economy. Nissan’s strategy is to make it accessible to a wider audience.”
It’s a business case, then, and given that Nissan is a commercial concern that’s entirely reasonable. “It’s not intended to be Audi RS or BMW M,” continues Rodriguez. “It’s for a mass audience. You have to look at it from a business perspective.”
It’s a shame that NISMO – a brand I associate, owing to many happy hours spent playing Gran Turismo, with no-compromise performance – is being watered down to little more than a trim line. There’s no doubting, however, that a great many buyers will be drawn in by the body styling, kit levels and sportier dynamics.
NISMO: 'not for petrolheads' says Nissan
How will NISMO maintain any credibility as a performance division, though? Given that Nissan chose not to produce a run of focused, uncompromising performance cars alongside a winning international motorsport campaign over a period of, say, five years before filtering the body styling cues down to the rest of the range in an Audi S Line or BMW M-Sport manner you’d expect that a halo product is needed.
In the coming months we’ll see an R.S. badged Juke NISMO, but soon after that will come a GT-R NISMO, which might be just the ticket. Until that model arrives NISMO is at risk of being diluted.