This week, Nissan reported a record profit of US$4.1 billion for its fiscal year that ended in March; it now has the widest operating margins in the industry. Ghosn is given most of the credit, but Nakamura's designs have clearly had a role in redefining the company. Ghosn told him that he and his designers should "build very simple, good designs -- nothing more than that," Nakamura said. "Design-wise we have a lot of freedom."
One expression of that freedom can been seen in headlights and taillights. Nissan designers use them in much the same way that Apple exposed the innards of some of its iMacs, treating the circuitry itself as a piece of sculpture. Many of the Nakamura-era lights are transparent; instead of looking at a headlight and seeing a flat plastic surface, h the bulbs, which often resemble projectors, are visible. Most notable are the Altima's roughly triangular taillights that expose three jewel-like bulbs -- red, yellow and silver.
"This shows the technology," said Nakamura, standing in front of a Z-Roadster, which has a similar approach in its headlights. "This is a very simple surface, but the inside of the lamp is very complicated because it has a lot of technology. We don't want to make a complex surface outside, but this, the interior, these things are very Japanese. Simplicity with lots of detail."
He also pointed out the back of the car's steering wheel, usually an afterthought, but here the curves appeared deliberately crafted. Nakamura likened it to the back of a nice watch. "It's for your satisfaction," he said. "You say, 'I have a nice watch,' and this is a nice car."
The son of an Osaka businessman, Nakamura began doodling cars as a young boy and remembers being inspired when he encountered an MG, the British sports car. "It was, to me, an unusual car to see," he said. "Very exciting. It was the 1960s, and we had very few sports cars in Japan."
He went on to study at an art school in Tokyo and at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, the training ground for many of the world's top car designers, including J Mays, Ford's design chief, and Chris Bangle, the American who is now BMW's chief designer.
Nakamura is staunchly anti-retro -- "Nissan no retro," he said -- and cites among his influences the architects Frank Lloyd Wright and Tadao Ando. Ando designed the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts in St. Louis, two concrete rectangles encasing a busy interior, and is also known for the Church of Light outside of Osaka. The church, which has been described as a concrete box, is notable for two bisecting slits cut into a wall to create, when the sun hits at the right time, a shimmering cross.
"It is very simple, and it is very advanced," Nakamura said of the church. "I took a lot of inspiration from that kind of architecture."
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