New Approach To Development At Nissan: Faster And More Efficient, Modelled After The Chinese

Nissan, which has had significant business difficulties in recent years, is now recovering. One of the company’s key goals is to dramatically accelerate the development of new models, and to do so, they have sought inspiration from the practices of their Chinese competitors.

CEO Kazuyuki Yamaguchi recently told the company headquarters that Nissan will not survive if it cannot introduce new products faster. The company has implemented a series of major changes and now says that the development of all-new vehicles has been cut from 50 to 37 months. Redesigning existing models now takes 30 months, a 40 percent speedup.

Yamaguchi explained that planning and development in the past were delayed because the company insisted on perfection in every detail. Now, he says, priorities are clearer and focused on the car’s key strengths. The company has abandoned the practice of producing multiple design proposals, which previously slowed down decision-making. Instead, vehicles are grouped into “families” that share a technical basis, significantly speeding up the design process.

Technology is also helping to speed up the process. Instead of continuously building and testing physical prototypes, the company is now relying more on modeling and simulations using artificial intelligence. It is also using digital twins and virtual reality to test vehicles in a digital environment before production. In addition, advanced autonomous driving systems allow engineers to conduct tests even at night.

Yamaguchi admitted that the company no longer has the luxury of wasting time. He also explained the changes in the organization: each vehicle no longer has a separate program director, head of product planning, and chief engineer, because their differing views often caused conflicts and delays.

Now the main responsibility lies with the program director, and the task of the chief engineer is to deliver a vehicle that meets the set goals.

Despite significant progress, including the development of the new Skyline in just 26 months, Nissan still can’t keep up with the pace of Chinese automakers, which develop new models in 18 to 24 months. Yamaguchi attributes this in part to differences in work culture.

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