Quote:
Originally Posted by Maelochs
What seems most likely to me is that Nissan will build the motor and fund the OnRoak car and call it a Nissan. Nissan hasn't shown any great propensity to spend a lot of money for prototypes, preferring to supply motors, which is a science a lot better understood.
I assume any hybrid research comes out of the R&D budget, and the company expects direct RoI, as opposed to the diffuse and unquantifiable RoI of "publicity" from racing.
Much better (As with the ZedWingOdd) to hire the folks who know how to do it and pay for the materials.
|
Following on from @joeb's comments on this, there tends to be a vastly greater pressure on marketing to display near term ROI than there is on long term product development.
Marketing isn't always easy to quantify, especially in the B2C space Nissan is in, but there are metrics that will be being applied to whatever Nissan do here, be it airtime they derive, test drive requests, additional twitter followers or whatever, and I suspect Mr Cox is emphatically aware of what he has budget wise and what he's expected to deliver.
If Nissan corporately makes a decision to step up to a full LMP1 programme then don't expect it to be funded out of R&D - this would (and should) be a joined up corporate effort - look at what Porsche have done across multiple media channels with the Mission 2014 message - Nissan would do the same and more, because if they didn't the whole programme would be a waste of money.