Sean McLain
speaker
44 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 1 May
Sean McLain’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Yeah. Well, if you remember, the Nissan Leaf. At the time, 15 years ago, it was absolutely groundbreaking. Introducing the 100% electric Nissan Leaf. Innovation for the planet. Innovation for all. And Nissan was the first company to bring a sort of mass market EV to the market and proved that they could make a EV... that could be a viable replacement for a gasoline vehicle.
Well, Nissan has placed a lot of the blame at the feet of a man named Carlos Ghosn.
Carlos Ghosn.
I don't know if everybody remembers the term BRICS, right? So you had your Brazil, your Russia, your India, your China, your South Africa. Carlos Ghosn's big bet is that there was hundreds of millions of people in these new middle classes emerging in these smaller, poorer countries that were all going to buy Nissans for the first time.
And Nissan, more so than other car makers, they wanted to be the first to market for a lot of these countries.
And he was betting the substantial portion of that growth on emerging market demand that, frankly, never materialized.
Well, instead, Nissan ended up with a bunch of half-filled factories around the world that, instead of being profit engines, just were giant black holes and money furnaces for Nissan's cash.
Carlos Ghosn disappears. And that sets about a number of things that change at Nissan, including management overhaul, turmoil, chaos, and infighting within Nissan, but also a broad reset of Nissan's strategic vision for what kind of a company it wants to be. And Nissan goes about trying to shut down all of these factories that Carlos Ghosn has had built around the world.
They lay off about 10% of their workforce. They say they need to shrink to regrow their profits. Nissan shrinks from selling about 6 million cars a year. to three and a half today. Whoa. So Nissan has become a much smaller company as they shut down factories and produce fewer vehicles. However, profits have not really rebounded. It's just today a much smaller company with much less cash.
With the advent of all these electric vehicles coming out, you are starting to see that market share being taken away. Chinese car companies, especially when it comes to electric vehicles, are really eating the lunch of the global car industry.
Well, Nissan decided that it could use a helping hand and reached out to crosstown rival Honda about a potential partnership specifically on electric vehicles, but has since blossomed into a potential marriage.
It's a matter of survival for Nissan. Everybody sees this as Honda bailing out Nissan and Nissan receiving a much needed lifeline.
I mean, OK, first of all, you have to understand Mibe, the Honda CEO, a little bit. He wears his heart on his sleeve. He was asked what he saw in Nissan.
And he gave this very long, rambling answer.
It was a very simple question, which you would think have a very simple answer, but this is stereotypical Mibe.
Yeah, he is. He's honest in an endearing way for a modern CEO.
So the Japanese government is one of the biggest architects pushing this deal for one very big reason. Jobs in Japan that directly work for these two companies and are reliant on these two companies having manufacturing and research facilities in Japan.
And so the hope is that by combining together, they might together produce enough vehicles and sell enough vehicles in Japan to sort of justify their continued existence.
Well, the number one challenge is culture. These are two extremely different companies. Nissan historically has had its top management picked from the University of Tokyo, the sort of the Harvard of Japan, Keio University, the sort of blue-blooded patrician elite of Japanese education. And their leadership tends to be people who come up through the sales side of the business.
Whereas Honda has always been an engineering company. And Honda's leaders have typically come up through their research and development arm. People whose engineering chops have propelled them to the top of the company. So these are two very different corporate cultures. And frankly, even the way that they operate internally are very different.
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