- FRANKFURT: Nissan’s Infiniti premium car brand is to announce plans to build a compact car in Europe in the next couple of years, making it the first Asian luxury brand to manufacture locally, people familiar with the matter said.
The car, based on flexible architecture provided by alliance partner Daimler, would not likely be built either in Daimler or Nissan plants.
Apart from overtaking Toyota’s Lexus brand in Europe, Infiniti hopes to avoid exporting from Japan to Europe compact cars in “decent volumes” because of the strong yen.
“Lexus is being hamstrung by the yen, it’s killing them at 77 yen to the dollar,” one of the people said.
Nissan Motor executive vice president Andy Palmer said: “I am on record saying Infiniti is going to bring a C-segment car to the market that would compete with Audi A3 and BMW 1 series.
“The speculation is that we’ll use a Daimler platform to execute that car. I’m not going to confirm or deny the speculation, I’ll only tell you that we don’t have a platform inside Nissan Group that would allow us to manufacture that car.”