2013 Nissan Sentra on 2040-cars

Auto blog

Carlos Ghosn video: 'This is about conspiracy. This is about backstabbing'

TOKYO — Nissan's former Chairman Carlos Ghosn maintained his innocence in a video released by his legal team Tuesday and accused some executives at the Japanese automaker of a "conspiracy" that led to his arrest on financial misconduct allegations. "The first message is that I'm innocent," said Ghosn, wearing a white shirt and dark jacket and speaking calmly in the nearly 10-minute video shown at the Foreign Correspondents' Club in Tokyo. "This is a conspiracy," he said. "This is not about specific events, this is not about, again, greed, this is not about dictatorship. This is about a plot. This is about conspiracy. This is about backstabbing." His lawyer Junichiro Hironaka said the video was prepared in case Ghosn was not able to speak at a news conference planned for Thursday. Ghosn was arrested last week while out on bail and remains at the Tokyo Detention Center. Ghosn said the executives behind the conspiracy were motivated by what he called "selfish fears," including what they saw as a merger with French alliance partner Renault SA. They mistook his leadership for greed and dictatorship, when he was the biggest defender of Nissan's autonomy, Ghosn said. He also said he was worried about Nissan, wondering whether those executives were really watching out for the company. Hironaka said a section of the video in which Ghosn mentioned names was removed on his legal advice. Nissan Motor Co., while declining to comment on the criminal case, has said an internal investigation has found that Ghosn falsified financial documents to under-report compensation, and that he used Nissan money for personal gain. "Nissan's internal investigation has uncovered substantial evidence of blatantly unethical conduct," company spokesman Nicholas Maxfield said when asked for comment on Ghosn's video. "The company's focus remains on addressing weaknesses in governance that enabled this misconduct." Ghosn's fourth arrest was on a fresh breach of trust allegation based on suspicion that payments from a Nissan subsidiary to an Oman dealership were diverted to a company effectively run by Ghosn. On Monday, Nissan Motor Co. shareholders voted to oust Ghosn from its board and to approve the appointment of French alliance partner Renault SA's Chairman Jean-Dominique Senard as Ghosn's replacement. Renault owns 43 percent of Nissan.

Nissan to give Qashqai the Nismo treatment

Nismo is on a bit of a rampage lately. Once consigned to the fringes, Nissan has taken its performance sub-brand into the mainstream and let it loose on a whole mess of its products. The Juke Nismo was followed by a 370Z Nismo, and in Los Angeles, we saw the GT-R Nismo, Sentra Nismo concept and Juke Nismo RS.
So what's next from Nismo? According to the latest intel from across the pond, Nissan is working on a tuned version of its new Qashqai. Car magazine is reporting that the larger crossover will get the same 1.6-liter turbo four as the Juke Nismo, but with the RS model's 212-horsepower out and not the "base" model's 197. Expect all the other bells and whistles applied to transform a Nissan model into a Nismo one to apply as well.
If the Qashqai name doesn't ring any proverbial bells for you, that's alright, because it's only sold overseas, where it's one of Nissan's most popular models. The crossover (which looks like the new Rogue but is a substantially different model) was recently completely replaced, with engine options ranging up to 150 horsepower - so the jump to over 200 should make for quite a different beast altogether. Whether a parallel or subsequent program to give the Rogue a similar treatment is another matter, but given the pace at which Nismo seems to be running, that may only be a matter of time.

A car writer's year in new vehicles [w/video]

Christmas is only a week away. The New Year is just around the corner. As 2014 draws to a close, I'm not the only one taking stock of the year that's we're almost shut of. Depending on who you are or what you do, the end of the year can bring to mind tax bills, school semesters or scheduling dental appointments. For me, for the last eight or nine years, at least a small part of this transitory time is occupied with recalling the cars I've driven over the preceding 12 months. Since I started writing about and reviewing cars in 2006, I've done an uneven job of tracking every vehicle I've been in, each year. Last year I made a resolution to be better about it, and the result is a spreadsheet with model names, dates, notes and some basic facts and figures. Armed with this basic data and a yen for year-end stories, I figured it would be interesting to parse the figures and quantify my year in cars in a way I'd never done before. The results are, well, they're a little bizarre, honestly. And I think they'll affect how I approach this gig in 2015. {C} My tally for the year is 68 cars, as of this writing. Before the calendar flips to 2015 it'll be as high as 73. Let me give you a tiny bit of background about how automotive journalists typically get cars to test. There are basically two pools of vehicles I drive on a regular basis: media fleet vehicles and those available on "first drive" programs. The latter group is pretty self-explanatory. Journalists are gathered in one location (sometimes local, sometimes far-flung) with a new model(s), there's usually a day of driving, then we report back to you with our impressions. Media fleet vehicles are different. These are distributed to publications and individual journalists far and wide, and the test period goes from a few days to a week or more. Whereas first drives almost always result in a piece of review content, fleet loans only sometimes do. Other times they serve to give context about brands, segments, technology and the like, to editors and writers. So, adding up the loans I've had out of the press fleet and things I've driven at events, my tally for the year is 68 cars, as of this writing. Before the calendar flips to 2015, it'll be as high as 73. At one of the buff books like Car and Driver or Motor Trend, reviewers might rotate through five cars a week, or more. I know that number sounds high, but as best I can tell, it's pretty average for the full-time professionals in this business.