The Drive 🤝 your inbox. Every weekday
The Daily Brief wraps up the biggest stories and our exclusive reporting on the auto industry and car culture.
One of Nissan’s top executives just made fans a very simple and enticing offer: If you really want a new Z car with a classic T-top roof, ask and you shall receive.
The Nissan Z Kaze T-top concept debuted Wednesday and while it’s officially a concept, the automaker is being unusually direct in laying out a path to a production model. During an exclusive interview, Senior Vice President and Chief Planning Officer for Nissan North America, Ponz Pandikuthira told The Drive, “Tell your fans, you got plenty of them, that if you really want this car, be loud and tell Nissan you absolutely want it, because then they’ll build it.
“It’s a concept, we’re playing with something,” Pandikuthira added. “But if it gets well received from the public we’re gonna make that car happen.”
Nissan
Nissan
Nissan has been trying to chart a course out of the wilderness for the last two years and announced a massive turnaround plan in April. The first salvo in that plan is about to arrive in the form of the mass-market Rogue Hybrid that’ll attempt to battle the juggernaut that is the Toyota RAV4. Another step is to take on the Toyota 4Runner, Jeep Wrangler, and Ford Bronco with a new Xterra using V6 and hybrid powertrains.
But those are volume models that will sit alongside the larger Armada SUV and Frontier pickup truck. In April, Nissan President and CEO Ivan Espinosa said to The Drive, “The sports cars are the core of what we are as a company.” This was also where Espinosa mentioned that Nissan’s already working on a new GT-R, while Pandikuthira said the next-gen Godzilla will be electrified, sport the VR38 block, and arrive in 2030.
The man in charge of Nissan’s global corporate product strategy, Richard Candler, told The Drive, “We are really deeply looking at the sports [car] lineup again. We all want to do some cool cars.” Candler also noted in regards to the Silvia specifically, “I’d love to bring back that nameplate. I do think it’s really valuable,” and that there’s “still space” for it.
The Nissan Z Kaze concept. Nissan
And, just last week, Pandikuthira said “there will be subtle nods to [Nissan’s] heritage” in its lineup going forward, and that he wants customers to “feel that lineage” in the automaker’s cars as it strives to be “true to our origins.”
Hard to argue a new Z with T-top panels doesn’t deliver on that message. Make enough noise online, and soon enough you might just be able to place a reservation with your local Nissan dealer.
Got a tip? Drop us a line at tips@thedrive.com
Add The Drive as a preferred source on Google to see more of our reporting.
As Director of Content and Product, Joel draws on over 15 years of newsroom experience and inability to actually stop working to help ensure The Drive shapes the future of automotive media. He’s also a World Car Award juror.
