Japan’s carmakers have decided that four to five years is too long to build a new car. Nissan wants a new North American SUV done in three years and one month, Suzuki is aiming for about two years by 2030, and Honda wants to halve development time, cost and workload at once. The target is the same for all of them: China, where new models typically reach the market in under two years.
The scale of the gap comes from a Kyodo News roundup published Saturday, Oct. 24 and picked up by The Straits Times on Sunday. Toyota, Honda, Nissan and the rest typically spend around four to five years developing a new model, Kyodo reports, more than twice the time Chinese brands need. NHK World puts it a little more gently (two to three years for China against three to four for Japan), but the direction is the same, and NHK notes that Chinese automakers overtook Japan in global vehicle sales last year for the first time.
Who is doing what
Nissan is going “family-based.” Instead of engineering each model on its own, it will design one common platform for several vehicles of the same size. The first test is a new SUV for North America in 2028, with a lead time of three years and one month. Derivatives on the same platform should then take up to 40% less, about two and a half years. Kyodo says the plan will cover 80% of Nissan’s global sales and cut the number of part types by 70%. “This is a reform to become a company that responds to changes and delivers good cars in a timely manner,” said Hidemi Sasaki, deputy general manager of Nissan’s product planning division.
Honda, which is trying to bounce back from its first net loss last fiscal year, calls its plan “Triple Half”: halve development costs, time frames and workloads from 2025 levels, leaning hard on AI and other digital tools. It starts with models whose development begins in 2028, so buyers won’t see the results for a while.
Toyota is attacking the problem through parts. It is trimming the number of part types to match what customers actually want, which speeds up both engineering and production, and a project called “Area 35” aims to improve the use of factory floor space by 35%.
Suzuki set the most aggressive number. President Toshihiro Suzuki said at a technology briefing in September that the company wants to cut new-model development roughly in half from fiscal 2020 levels, to about two years, by 2030, while raising development efficiency 30% and production efficiency 50%, Reuters reported. “Instead of moving to the next step after the previous one finishes, planning, design, production, quality and purchasing will start out looking at the same goal,” he said. Vehicles built on a shared platform, which used to take 40 to 48 months, should take 24. Mitsubishi Motors is aiming for a 20% cut, to three years, around 2030.
Why now
The pressure is already parked in Japanese showrooms. NHK points out that BYD launched a kei-class EV in Japan this summer after spending roughly two years bringing it to market, about the time a Japanese brand needs just to settle a platform. Speed matters more when the rules keep moving too: Japan’s EV subsidy gets cut from January, and Europe’s proposed “Made in Europe” EV perks could leave Japan-built cars out.
Not everyone wants Japan to copy China’s pace wholesale. Automotive analyst Takaaki Sugiura told NHK that shorter development is “one of the highest priorities” for Japanese makers, but that thorough safety and reliability testing “is directly linked to the reputation and safety of Japanese automobiles.” He also flagged software, which now takes up a growing share of development time.
That last point is where Tesla has been playing a different game for years. A Tesla can change meaningfully after it leaves the factory through over-the-air updates, so the hardware cycle and the software cycle don’t have to move together. Toyota is heading the same way with its Arene-based end-to-end driving system for 2028. Hardware in two years, software every few weeks: that’s the bar Japan is chasing now.
Sources: Kyodo News, The Straits Times, NHK World-Japan, Reuters via Newsweek Japan.
— The EVX News team
Featured image: Nissan Global Headquarters in Yokohama, seen from the water. Photo: Ymblanter, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 (cropped).
