Nissan finally confirmed that it was going to launch a new generation of Skyline after the current one has been around with light updates for more than a decade. This year, it surprised us by announcing that it would reveal the Skyline by the end of this year. This is all due to the company going to great lengths to shorten its product development time, and the man in charge of those efforts recently talked about how it’s doing it.
It’s All About Simplifying, Prioritizing, And Digitizing
Nissan has previously said that it’s focused on reducing the development time for its products significantly. It typically spent around 50 months to bring a new vehicle to fruition, and now it’s aiming for around 37 months for a vehicle on a new platform, and around 30 for ones on existing platforms. However, the company hadn’t gone into much depth as to exactly how it’s doing that, until recently, when Kazuyuki Yamaguchi, the head of Nissan’s product development division, shared specifics with the media.
Nissan Skyline TeasersNissan
Japanese outlet Kuruma covered Yamaguchi’s presentation, which covered how Nissan has two main development phases, and that Nissan is streamlining each. The first phase is regarded as the “digital phase,” which seems to mainly focus on early planning, benchmarking, and styling. With regard to planning and benchmarking, Nissan will apparently focus on the most important areas for customers with each vehicle, rather than trying to one-up the competition in every aspect. On the styling side, it’s also aiming to settle on a design idea earlier on, rather than letting competing designs develop and compete with each other. It’s also reorganizing its management teams, putting them in charge of more specific and focused aspects of development to make it faster and easier to make decisions.
The second phase, as reported by Kuruma, is called the “physical phase,” which covers the development of the final vehicle after basic design, particularly with testing and development of final parts. Ironically, part of Nissan’s solution for speeding up this part of the process is making the physical phase more digital. In this case, it’s leaning more on digital modeling and design tools, as well as digital, simulated testing, rather than physical real-world testing. It’s also using more AI in developing, running, and reporting on tests, plus it’s implementing autonomous driving functions for consistent real-world testing on tracks.
Skyline Teaser Rear lights illuminatedNissan
Shortening development time has a number of benefits for Nissan. For one thing, it means it can respond much more quickly to the market. In a world with rapidly shifting government regulations and customer demands, that’s critical. The competition, especially in China, has been much faster, too, leaving Nissan at a disadvantage. Finally, the longer a vehicle is in development, the more expensive it is to develop, which can hurt profits and make a vehicle’s final price higher than it needs to be competitive.
The Skyline Is The First Model To Reach Production Using These Techniques
These methods are already in use with Nissan, and the Skyline is taking advantage of them. Nissan CEO Ivan Espinosa revealed that the new Skyline’s development ended up taking just 26 months, compared to 55 for the last version. That’s actually a few months faster than the target range for vehicles on existing platforms. This does support the theory that the new Skyline is based on the existing platform that the old Skyline and the current Z use. Since we’re also expecting it to use Z powertrains, too, we can see how Nissan might have even shaved time off its target.
2024 Infiniti Q50 3.0L Twin-turbo VR30DDTT V6 EngienJared Rosenholtz/CarBuzz/Valnet
As we’ve mentioned previously, we’ll see the Skyline revealed by the end of the year. Teasers have shown that it will retain some signature styling details, such as the quad circular taillights. It even has retro Skyline script badges on the sides like on the first-generation car. The US won’t get the Skyline as a Nissan, but it will arrive as the successor to the current Infiniti Q50. It will even be offered with a manual transmission in both markets.
CarBuzz Insight – Why This Matters:
Nissan’s condition over the past few years has been increasingly dire, which has led to it making some dramatic changes. Those have included putting Ivan Espinosa in charge, making huge cost cuts, and preparing an ambitious slate of new product launches. This is yet another part of the turnaround plan. The faster development process will be extremely important for the company to stay competitive, and it’s good that it’s implementing them soon. We have some small concerns about whether the increased speed, along with more reliance on AI for aspects of testing, could lead to shortcomings, but it’s impossible to know until new products are in the wild. Still, Nissan seems to be on the right track.
Source: Kuruma
