Quote:
Originally Posted by nicknick
As nice as the Zed is why couldn't they do a folding harttop like Mazda's MX5, it only added 37 kilos to the equation.
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The better question is why would Nissan need two "sporty" cars that are hard-top convertibles? I would submit that one of GM's biggest problems was supporting the tooling and manufacture of essentially the same car under multiple nameplates when one version was probably enough. Nissan already has a nice, sporty, luxury-minded hard-top convertible in the G37; there is just no reason to do the exact same thing in the Z which would also have the side affect of limiting performance even more than the convertible already will. And there is especially no reason to do it in a TVM under 10M/year; barely sufficient to keep even well-healed manufacturers in business.
Also, the weight issue isn't insignificant. Assuming the hardtop added 37 Kilos to the MX5 (no other causes/variables) the MX5 is a smaller car than the Z; any hardtop on the Z would likely add more than 37K but even if that's all it added; do people really want to add an extra 80+ lbs to the car just to have a hard-top the will likely be down most of the time anyway?