If Honda and Nissan can’t survive at their size, well Subaru and Mazda are tiny by comparison.
I doubt the merger has anything to do with survival and everything to do with consolidating power and profit.
Has to do with survival for Nissan and Mitsubishi.
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Nothing I hope, Subaru is great and I will be furious if they fuck it up.
Subaru’s are doing fine and owners love them. Sure they ain’t big but they got a profitable business with a good brand name.
I don’t know, Subaru is a pretty big brand at least where I live.
Doesn’t Toyota own like 40% of Subaru?
Huh.
Toyota Motors bought a little over 40% of GM’s former FHI stock, amounting to 8.7% of FHI. (The rest of GM’s shares went to a Fuji stock buy-back program.)[17]
FHI being Fuji Heavy Industry, which is now Subaru Corporation.
*Subaru Corporation:
Owners
Toyota (20.42%)
The Master Trust Bank of Japan investment trusts (14.15%)
Custody Bank of Japan investment trusts (5.28%)
State Street Bank West Client - Treaty 505234 (1.56%)
(as of September 30, 2024)[3]
Nissan made some absolutely terrible design decisions, namely the wide use of CVTs. I think this has contributed to their downfall. I imagine Subaru and Mazda will be OK.
To be fair, Nissan CVTs end up being garbage because their fluid change interval is like 100K miles when it should be 30K miles. Change that fluid on the regular, and it’ll be fine.
Subaru uses CVTs as well.
The problem is people see Nissans CVTs being shit and just assume all CVTs are shit. Really Nissan just chooses to make shit CVTs and their brand suffers because of it.
Subaru puts CVTs in their cars and they’re largely fine. They naturally had some teething issues initially but coincidentally that was with the torque converter side of things and not the CV side.
60k miles on my Subaru CVT and I beat the absolute shit out of it. I’ve towed at least 10 cords of wood with it and regularly pull a 12’ enclosured trailer with it. I’m constantly pushing its limits and thus far its managed fine.
Toyota does too have several CVT options.
I thought the point was to combine so that they could compete with Chinese EV’s? To better move forward with hybrid and EV vehicles as the world transitions away from ICEs? I think it’s crazy that even combined they still sell a fraction of what Toyota sells and still only puts them at #3 behind VW. I only recently learned it’s so lopsided.
Thus the question how Subaru and Mazda won’t get curbstomped when they are so much smaller.
Since it appears Toyota has an interest in Subaru and Subaru has insane brand loyalty, they should be fine. Toyota could take a more direct role through sharing technology if it would help. I don’t know much about Mazda other than they are still made in Japan and I love my CX5. I certainly hope there is room for the smaller, high quality brands. I would be concerned about any manufacturer that hasn’t made progress on hybrid and EV tech though. I hear those Chinese kids make some pretty inexpensive options.
It’s not that they can’t survive because of their size, it’s that they can’t survive with the crappy products they’ve been putting out lately and their costs. From what I’ve seen Subaru still has a decent profit margin, so it doesn’t matter that they’re smaller.
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