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Ghosn orders Nissan USA to double sales by 2017

Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn has just one teensy-weensy request for its United States arm: Double your sales by 2017.
"China was not our biggest, I would say, disappointment. It was mainly the United States. We were expecting a strong year in the United States. It didn't happen," Ghosn said, speaking at a conference after announcing Nissan's 2012 fiscal results, Automotive News reports. Because of this, Ghosn has ordered his US executives to iron out the problems that affected new vehicle launches and to strengthen the company's dealer network.
In 2012, Nissan's US sales rose to 1.1 million units - a five-percent increase, and a record, at that. But the company's overall market share fell from 8.2 percent to 7.7 percent, putting the company further away from its goal of having a 10-percent stake overall.

Asking price for Paul Walker's GT-R from Fast & Furious nearly triples [w/video]

The German owner of the only Nissan Skyline GT-R to survive filming Fast & Furious (a.k.a., The Fast and the Furious 4) has put his car up for sale following the death of Paul Walker, Yahoo Autos reports. The original sale price was reportedly an already hefty 300,000 euros ($412,110), but it has since been raised to 1,000,000 euros ($1.37 million).
Despite many well-intentioned efforts, the Skyline GT-R was (and still is) illegal to import for street use in the US, so this R34-generation GT-R and seven others were shipped here without engines and classified as kit cars to sidestep federal law. Once here, the engines were installed, and seven street-legal GT-Rs proceeded to be destroyed during the filming of F&F. But one car, the "hero" car for sale here, was driven by Walker in non-violent scenes and thus is the only GT-R that survived filming.
Then, in July 2009, the federal government cracked down on importers of these cars, seizing almost 50 GT-Rs, including this one, telling owners to export them or risk having them destroyed. The hero GT-R was therefore exported, and its whereabouts have been unknown until recently, when the current German owner allowed it to be featured in a review (watch the German-language video below). You can see the online ad (also German) of the heavily modified GT-R here, where it sits proudly with its sky-high price tag.

NHTSA opens investigation into Nissan's handling of airbag recall

In March of 2014, Nissan recalled eight models among its Nissan and Infiniti brands, totaling more than one million vehicles, over faulty occupant classification system software controlling the passenger airbag. The company discovered a variety of factors that would interfere with the system's ability to detect an adult passenger in the shotgun seat, resulting in an illuminated warning on on the dashboard and the passenger airbag not deploying in an accident. Yet 124 complaints submitted to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration since the recall allege that the dealer-installed fix hasn't actually fixed the problem; some consumers say the problem persists after multiple trips to the dealer. The Detroit News reports that NHTSA is opening an investigation into the matter to determine whether a new recall is needed. The occupant sensor has been a bugbear for Nissan over the past couple of years; a much smaller recall for the issue in 2013 covered five of the eight vehicles that were recalled in 2014, and that earlier recall also continued to generate complaints after the issue had supposedly been fixed. At the same time, the company learned that in two instances there was another twist, where the dashboard warning wasn't illuminated but the passenger airbag still didn't go off in an accident. Nissan isn't alone, though, with airbag recalls on a steep upswing across the industry even before the Takata debacle.