Nissan 350Z

The company's FM platform blitz accelerates with the new sports car.

Though Nissan's Z sports car has been absent from the U.S. and other markets for some time, the 300ZX, officially the fourth-generation model, lived until August 2000 in Japan. The end-of-run low-volume production was delegated to Nissan Shatai (body), a wholly owned subsidiary of Nissan Motor Co., specializing in body fabrication and vehicle assembly with its own styling and engineering capabilities. Nissan Shatai was planning to renovate the ZX, mainly to meet forthcoming crashworthiness requirements that would allow the car to survive to the 2002 model year, but then the financial bottom dropped out from under Nissan, throwing the entire company into total confusion, as President Carlos Ghosn explained in an interview (see sidebar). However, a small group of enthusiastic Z-engineers within Nissan, called the “Zkunk Works” or “Znake Pit,” were pursuing what they wished would be the basis of a future Z.

There were other harder-pressing issues at Nissan in the latter half of the 1990s. Its mid-size, rear-wheel-drive car range was showing its age; it was specifically conceived for the then-lucrative Japanese upper mid-class sedan segment, which was hotly contested by Toyota and Nissan. Nissan's rear-wheel-drive platform produced the Skyline and Laurel twins and the Stagea station wagon version, but none of those models could be fitted with a steering wheel on the left side of the cockpit because of the offset placement of the inline six-cylinder engine, thus limiting its export possibilities.