Nissan Motor Co. unveiled a new electric vehicle and redesign of its corporate “hamburger” logo, aiming to start over after months of management turmoil and declining profitability.
The Ariya, an all-electric SUV with a range of up to 610 kilometers (379 miles), is the first all-new product to launch under a new leadership that took over in December. The debut of the model, which starts at around 5 million yen ($ 46,600), is the latest effort by the automaker to update an old line.
“Ariya has all the essence of Nissan technology,” said Makoto Uchida, Nissan CEO.
Nissan could benefit from rumors about a new vehicle, although it is not scheduled to go on sale until mid-2021. The Japanese automaker had its biggest loss in two decades for the year ending in March, and the arrest in November. In 2018, former leader Carlos Ghosn unleashed management confusion that persists to this day. The Ariya serves as a reminder that Nissan remains Japan’s second-largest automaker by production and that it has been working for years in preparation for the era of electric vehicles and autonomous driving.
A successor to the Leaf
The Ariya is a successor to the all-electric Leaf, which went on sale a decade ago in Japan and the U.S. Renewed once in 2017, the five-door hatchback is one of the best-selling electric vehicles in the world, with around than 500,000 vehicles shipped. up to this point. A downside to the Leaf, however, has been its limited range of about 200 miles or 322 kilometers.
With a length of 4.6 meters and a height of 1.6 meters, the Ariya fits perfectly into the compact SUV category. The interior space, however, is comparable to that of a larger vehicle, thanks to the placement of batteries in the floor of the chassis, as in the models of Tesla Inc.
The Ariya comes with ProPilot 2.0, the latest version of Nissan’s autonomous driving technology. The feature, which was rolled out last year for the revamped Skyline, offers lane change and driver monitoring capabilities. The Ariya also has an automatic parking feature and Amazon.com Inc.’s digital voice assistant, Alexa.
The big question is whether consumers will be ready to buy the Ariya when it goes on sale in Japan in mid-2021, and whether Nissan will be able to get its business back on a more secure footing by then. For the next fiscal year through March, analysts project, on average, a loss of 323 billion yen and a 17% decrease in sales. In China, the Ariya will face stiff competition from Tesla, which has a local plant that produces Model 3 electric sedans and later Model Y SUVs.
“This car is extremely important to Nissan,” Senior Vice President Ivan Espinosa said in an interview. On Wednesday, Nissan valued 70 billion yen of notes in three tranches, in its first sale of yen debt since 2016.
Nissan is also using Ariya’s debut to sport a new corporate branding logo, which will be used on vehicles and official communications. It is a simplified version of the previous design, with only two semicircles representing the sun, headed by the letters of the company name.
The Ariya is making its debut just as the pandemic weighs on car demand and depresses economic activity around the world. Global sales of passenger cars are on track to fall 23% this year and electric vehicles are forecast to fall 18%, the first drop in the modern era, according to BloombergNEF.
After going on sale next year, the Ariya will hit the markets of Europe, the United States and China during the next fiscal year, which ends in March 2022.
