Quote:
Originally Posted by aszyd
They should go with SE-R for the "lesser" models and leave Nismo for their sports cars.
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They sort of did that already, and I think it led to brand confusion. You had the Sentra and the Altima (and if you want to get more specific, the 200SX as well) and the branding never really took off very well for any of the models except the Sentra.
I think the execution of the NISMO brand starting this year (the Juke, new Z, and GT-R, amongst the Versa, Pulsar, and Sentra concepts) is far better than any previous performance branding Nissan has done. It's consistent with respect to color schemes and exterior design themes, you get performance gains (however big or small, but I think they're working on that as shown with the GT-R and the Juke especially), and all the other things you'd expect from a performance variant of a car.
Ford and its ST brand is heading down the road Nissan already did with the SE-R variants. The performance stuff is there, but the branding isn't very well executed. It doesn't have a flagship like Nissan does with the GT-R NISMO, and that's the same problem that Nissan had with its SE-R branding. You won't see a flagship with Ford's ST because an ST variant doesn't fit into the Mustang branding, and it's highly unlikely you'll see a Ford GT ST. Where the NISMO branding is set up to where you could apply its design and engineering philosophy to almost any Nissan, you don't have that with the ST brand.