Alliance breaks up

Nissan has announced plans to leave Alliance Ventures of the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi coalition. The final decision will be announced at the end of March 2020.

Sources say Nissan has decided to follow in the footsteps of Mitsubishi Motors. A week earlier, they announced that they would stop funding the fund. The companies themselves do not comment on their statements.

Sad trends

Perhaps this decision by Nissan was the result of low 2019 revenues from supporting startups. The decline in Chinese sales due to the rampant coronavirus could also affect this. Nissan's Chinese sales fell 80% last month. The company's new CEO, Makoto Uchida, said this is a necessary measure for the company's profits to skyrocket.

Carlos Ghosn, the previous head of the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi alliance, created the Alliance Ventures asset to find and fund startups. They wanted to support the development of new automotive technologies: electric cars, autonomous driving systems, artificial intelligence, digital services. Initially, $ 200 million was invested in the fund. And already in 2023 it was planned to spend 1 billion for these purposes.

In a short period of its existence, the fund has supported more than a dozen startups. This included the WeRide robotic taxi service. They also sponsored Tekion, a unique automotive communications platform.

The news is reported by the magazine Automotive News Europe... They refer to several anonymous sources.