[jillesvangurp]

I think it's more realists vs. at this point the clearly losing ICE proponent side. The EV market grows double digit percentages every year. Mostly at the cost of the ICE car market. Even last year when lots of the ICE manufacturers insisted the EV market was 'shrinking' (no such thing happened), the EV market actually expanded by about 20% globally. And since the overall car market did not grow by such numbers, guess where all that growth went: not them.

Japanese companies like Nissan and Honda are a bit on that losing side. Quite literally; both are struggling with rapidly reducing demand for their now clearly obsolete vehicles and the ramp up of the production of competitive EV replacements for those.

Nissan basically dialed back investments after they got rid of Ghosn and the collaboration with Renault. Which was actually producing some early successes. Like the Nissan Leaf. They could have doubled down on that but they didn't.

Now years later they are basically facing a lot of issues with with an outdated product portfolio that can't keep up with new EVs from others grabbing lots of their market share in most of their key markets.

The reason the Nissan-Honda merger was on the table at all is that it really has gotten that bad for both of them. And of course merging two poorly performing companies doesn't result in a situation where the sum of the parts is larger than the value of the parts.

The reason this deal bounced (and was probably a bad idea to begin with) is that Nissan is in denial about their existential need to adapt to the changing market. EVs are at the center of that.