Nissan Motor CEO Ivan Espinosa Talks Autonomous Driving, Making Cars in US

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
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**Jonathan Ferro** (0:07)
Let's turn to Autos, Nissan, unveiling its vision for an AI-defined vehicle, announcing plans to use cutting-edge software to shrink development times and fast-track autonomous driving technology across 90% of its lineup. Joining us now is the Nissan President and CEO, Ivan Espinosa. Ivan, good to see you, sir. Thanks for being us.

**Ivan Espinosa** (0:24)
Good morning, thank you.

**Jonathan Ferro** (0:24)
You're with us here in New York. One question, okay, and then we're going to move on quickly, I promise. How many cars have you sold in Sea Breeze Blue Pearl in the last few months since a well-known manufacturer came out with a very expensive car in what looked like Sea Breeze Blue Pearl?

**Ivan Espinosa** (0:39)
Well, it was a surprise for us to see this car coming out because it's coincidentally the same color, like emblematic color that we used for our launch of the Nissan Leaf. So it was an interesting surprise, I would say.

**Jonathan Ferro** (0:51)
I'll move on quickly for you so we don't have to talk about it too much. Let's talk about the new cars. Can you describe for our audience the future of driving and what it's going to look like? Because if you think about what it's been like for the last century, it really hasn't changed too much. Four wheels, a driver, a wheel.
That's how it works. It gets better technology, improves, but we haven't seen massive changes. How different is it going to be in the future?

**Ivan Espinosa** (1:12)
The experience is going to completely evolve. So we're working a lot with AI technology to bring the cars into a full autonomous end-to-end experience, where you simply sit in the car behind the wheel, the car will take over for you. Let's say, I'm living in Japan, so let's say you go and play golf on the weekend.
If you enjoy driving, maybe you enjoy driving in the morning towards the golf course, you drive by yourself, but then on the way back, there's usually a lot of traffic. So you will just ask the car to drive for yourself, engage the autonomous mode, and then you can just either relax, check your news. There's a lot of things that you can do with people's time while they're sitting in the cabin, because we have two massive screens in front of them, and then we can feed a lot of information, we can make their lives more productive, entertainment. There's a lot of things that we are imagining for the future.

**Jonathan Ferro** (1:58)
In development times, you're an interesting piece of this as well. I'd love to breathe some life into that conversation. If you're in a car lot right now and you're trying to sell individual cars, it's a dream if you work for a manufacturer that can cut lead times for development and bring new cars to market, house them sell.
That's what a lot of companies are looking for. How's this going to change too?

**Ivan Espinosa** (2:18)
Well, we have evolved a lot. In the past 18 months, we have shortened our development process by around 40 percent. So now we are able of putting new cars on the road in 30 months from the concept moment all the way to the start of production, 30 months for a global development car. So this is the speed that Nissan has now.
It's helping us adjust a lot our launching schedules.
It's the future because the world is so unpredictable these days. We used to be a company that put a lot of energy forecasting and trying to predict what will happen in the future. But this is impossible now. With all the geopolitics and play and the context in which we live, it's very complicated. So we decided to put our energy just on being a nimbler and quicker company because this is a way to cope with the uncertainty of the world. As I said, we have reduced our development times now by 40%.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:07)
It does seem like these two things are at odds. On one hand, you've got the technological advancement that can speed things up, and then you've got policy that's just completely all over the place when it comes to things like autonomous driving and how you even test it.
Where do you think you're going to see the acceleration of autonomous driving in Nissan's market? The fastest, just based on what you're allowed to test and what you're allowed to roll out?

**Ivan Espinosa** (3:28)
Well, I think we need to go step by step. That technology today is actually ready. You can with the technology that we are working today with our partner, Wave, actually it's almost level four ready, so it means a completely driverless car.