Nissan Motor is looking to give
its Infiniti premium brand a design makeover that will dilute its
Japanese roots and flaunt a more "passionate" Latin feel.
The bold initiative aims to rev up an upscale brand that has
struggled to establish itself in a competitive global market for
premium cars.
Infiniti chief designer Alfonso Albaisa, a Cuban American, explains the
brand’s design concepts in front of an electronic board showing an
image of the Infiniti Q30 Concept.
Launched a quarter of a century ago in the United States with an
emphasis on its Japanese aesthetics, Infiniti sold about 180,000 cars
globally in the year to end-March - about a tenth of rival Audi's sales.
Now that Infiniti is seeking to attract Chinese car buyers and more
genuinely compete with established global premium brands such as
Daimler's Mercedes-Benz and Volkswagen's Audi, Mr Johan de Nysschen,
Infiniti's chief, says it is quietly scaling back its Japanese roots
and "going global".
The South African, a former Audi executive, said in a recent
interview in Beijing that to stand apart from "cold and
clinical-looking" German rivals, Infiniti aims to be "a seductive
provocateur... to attract people, seduce, be emotional".
Infiniti is going "Latin, very Latin", he added, noting that the
recently launched Q50 sedan offers a strong hint of that new design
direction.
He wants to boost Infiniti sales to half a million cars a year in
the next four to five years, with a fifth of those sold in China, the
world's biggest automobile market. That is a huge jump from the 21,000
cars it sold in the country in the year to March. By comparison, Audi
sold 1.6 million cars worldwide last year, including 492,000 in China.
Mr John Casesa, senior managing director of investment banking at
Guggenheim Securities in New York and a veteran auto industry observer,
said Infiniti's targets are "very ambitious", if not impossible.
He added: "It will take a terrific amount of time and money to
achieve any measure of success. The dominance of the German luxury
brands says clearly that success is a result of cumulative efforts over
a long period of time. You'd have to do great cars again and again and
again. That might be for 10, 15, 20 years."
Mr de Nysschen, 54, who joined Nissan from Audi around 18 months
ago, said: "Audi contributes half of Volkswagen group's profitability.
We should have a similar noble objective."
Infiniti's chief designer, Mr Alfonso Albaisa, a Cuban American
named last year to conjure up a new look for the brand, says Infiniti's
target buyers are independent-minded entrepreneur types who have
charted their own nontraditional road to success.
"Nothing against doctors... but the target customers didn't
necessarily go to Ivy League schools," he said at Infiniti's design
studio in Atsugi, 50km outside Tokyo, adding that the brand's
"emotional" new look should be on show in cars rolling off production
lines by 2016.
These models will have more sharply toned and sculpted "shoulder
lines", more nuanced and undulating hoods, and a more athletic posture
with all four wheels pushed as far as possible to the corners of the
vehicle, he said. He added that exterior surfaces should resemble "the
open ocean... right before a wave becomes a defined wave."
This, says Mr de Nysschen, should help give Infiniti cars the
clearly defined identity they currently lack. Infiniti cars are "very
curvaceous", he said, but this just makes some people think the cars
"look fat".
"That's what we have to begin to fix," he said.
To help drive the "global" shift, Nissan moved Infiniti's head
office to Hong Kong two years ago - locating its headquarters close to
China, but maintaining a global profile in a city it says is a gateway
between the East and the West.
Infiniti insiders - not all of whom fully embrace the branding shift
- say future models will still reflect Japanese values such as
precision and attention to detail, but Mr de Nysschen is going full
speed ahead to promote a more global profile.
"Just on our executive team, we have 15 different nationalities," he said.
"Infiniti doesn't consider itself to be a Japanese brand."
