Hi there! Welcome back. I hope you enjoyed the Qashqai video.
It was such a big video with so much stuff in it because David gave me so much information
from the interview, and he allowed me to take some bits out of the book. Many of the bits that
I wanted to get in had to be left out, so this is a great opportunity for me to get them in now.
So, first of all there was a real fight between Nissan in Europe and Nissan Japan over who would
actually run the project, because when it was being developed, when the team was over in Japan
they decided that the platform and the powertrain work would all be done in Japan,
and so if all the platform and powertrain works done in Japan then why do you want to
have a whole load of Brits going over to the UK to finish up the work, and actually develop the car
over in Europe. So, there was a real tussle between Europe and Japan about how it was going
to work. Also the UK team were a bunch of newbies who had produced the failed B32A project, so
could they really be trusted to make this really important car?
It was a real challenge. But of course in the end they pushed through and they managed to
get approval to be able to do it in the UK. So, obviously with car design you go from
simple drawings where you're just doing design sketches to get an idea for a car
all the way to a final production car and with car companies you go through different stages
to allow that to happen, and in Nissan's case there's “Case 1”, “Case 2”, and “Case 3”,
and with the case of the UK team they were a “Case 2” stage and they were pushing to
get to “Case 3” and they hadn't got official approval. There wasn't any team outside of
North America and Japan had ever got anything to “Case 3”. So, they ended up just saying
“well let's just assume we're already at “Case 3” and we'll just carry on doing the work”,
which is an interesting way of going about it! But it worked. It worked very well for them.
So, the amount of cost cutting work that the team did really shouldn't be underestimated. They spent
hours of merciless work just trying to what they call “nickel and dime” the suppliers on every
little tiny bit, to try and get the car to be profitable, which is why it was such a great car
for such a reasonable price. The Nissan team in the 1990s had used a lot of Nissan's traditional
suppliers when it came to the Alliance, when Renault came in, it allowed Nissan to use a lot
of Renault suppliers. And of course a lot of these were a lot more local to the Sunderland factory
than a lot of Nissan's suppliers had been. So, that really helped to help drive down the costs.
Another thing is the team worked really hard to get the car to market. They worked 30 days
straight towards the end of the project. That is they didn't take any weekends off for a
whole month. So, it was amazing the work that they did. Another thing is that the Qashqai,
although it was sort of seen as a replacement for the Almera, the smaller Almera sort of hatchback,
it was also a replacement for the Primera, the larger Ford Mondeo sized car, because
both cars were doing badly and Nissan had to essentially get rid of all its
loss-leading cars, and actually focus on things that made money. So, it was wonderful the Qashqai
did so well so that it could replace the loss of production for the Almera and the Primera.
So, another thing about the interview with David, and by the way the interview the whole
interview with David Twohig I've put up on the Little Car channel. So, if you want to see that
there's a link in the description and I’ll put a link above so you can you can go and see it.
But another thing I put to David was, shouldn't the original Qashqai have had a larger wheelbase?
If it just been a little bit bigger then they could have done a third row of seats
from the start. And he has his own opinion which he talks about in the interview,
but I’ll give you my opinion now which is it would have made the car more practical,
and it would have reduced the massive amount of work that they needed to make the Qashqai
+2. But that meant for every one of the smaller cars that they sold they would have needed to use
more metal, which would have made it more expensive. It would have made it heavier,
and also if they'd have come out with a Qashqai from day one with a third row of seats it may have
rubbed some of the coolness off the car. It may have made it more like a boring MPV or a minivan,
something that just transports kids. Whereas just being a five-seater and being a little higher,
bit more exciting… I think with a lot of cars you see if they come out with just essentially
one model that people get excited about, and then they turn into something else later,
the public accepts that. But if they make it kind of an all-singing or dancing thing at the start,
the public just doesn't see a clear message. And I think that could have been a real problem with
the Qashqai from day one, and then of course the Qashqai may not have been a hit. And if it hadn't
have been a hit then you would still have had a more expensive platform, a larger platform that
could have had three rows of seats but no one wanted three rows of seats. So anyway, hindsight is
a wonderful thing and maybe it would have been better to have done it in the at the start, but
there's no way the team could anticipate everything that could happen in the project.
There's different types of project design I used to do, lots of project design for Microsoft. And
back when we first started we used what's called “waterfall design”. So, when we decided to create
a project, the whole project would take a year and we would spend the first eight weeks planning it.
Then we would spend another eight, twelve weeks doing the “Milestone one” and then “Milestone
two”, then ”Milestone three” then we get to “Code complete” when theoretically all the
features were in. Then we would lock down and do bug fixing for a month or two and then we would
release the project. The problem is by the end of the year, because software development is much
faster paced than even car development we'd have a problem that there's all these things that we
hadn't anticipated. The market had moved on. So, we now had a project essentially was a year out
of date when we released it. And also you didn't really know what features would take longer to do,
and what would be easier to do. And it would end up dropping a whole load of things.
So, we moved to an “Agile” model where essentially we said we're just going to do two week sprints,
and we'd only do work for two weeks. We'd do the planning work for it and we just do the coding for
two weeks of work. So you obviously wouldn't get much done, but you'd end up doing lots and lots of
little two-week, or some people even do one-week sprints, and by doing that those little bits of
work, as you went on planning, as you went you end up following what the project actually needs to
be, and also dropping things that you've decided that you don't want to do. And you also end up
with a project that has far fewer bugs because you're constantly testing it as you go through it.
And of course car manufacturers have to take more of a Waterfall approach,
because they're making a car that's going to take a long time to make, but it's a long way of saying
that hindsight is wonderful and of course at the start of the project there's no way you
can anticipate what's going to happen towards the end of the project, what you might need.
So, moving on to the mk2 Qashqai. Another thing that's amazing about that is that the Espace,
the granddaddy minivan of them all used the Qashqai platform! So it's surprising
that the Qashqai platform could be used for so many different things. This new modular
platform they created for the mk2 project. So, the Qashqai highlights the success Renault and
the Alliance had not just to rejuvenate Nissan but also to make Renault more profitable.
With Mitsubishi now coming under Nissan, now being essentially owned by Nissan,
maybe it will rejuvenate Mitsubishi as well. Maybe it will put Mitsubishi on the right track.
So, finally there's a big pushback on the ubiquity of crossovers. One thing I see in my
videos is so many comments about people saying “I hate crossovers,
they're boring, they're bland! They're just taking over the world! We want cars of old”,
but obviously people love crossovers or they wouldn't be buying them.
And particularly as we move to electric vehicles, with the batteries in the floor it will make
these cars even better at handling than they than they are today, because obviously high
sided cars with a low centre of gravity for all the batteries will make it even better. I mean
if you look at the Tesla Model X and Model Y, you know those cars are very good at handling
but are really quite tall vehicles. But anyway, the pushback against crossovers being bland,
well they were really exciting when they first came out, and everyone was really excited about
them. But now of course they're everywhere and everyone's so bored with them, because
that's all you see on the road. But fashions come and go and we'll I’m sure at some point we'll see
another revolution in car styling, and then people will get excited about that. But certainly at the
moment there are a lot of crossovers on the road and they are a little dull to see. Anyway, that's
all I have for the Optional Extra video. Thank you for watching and I’ll see you in the next video!