Top Cars

Nissan hung a "sculpture" today on the wall of a meeting room at the company’s Nissan 360 global product review: a sculpture that hints at the design of the next-generation Nissan Z.

Same thing was done my Mazda in 1980s when the company unveiled the Miata. Mazda got a huge kick out of how hundreds of journalists visited the R&D facility but never noticed the secret roadster that everyone was talking about was hanging there in plain sight.

Nissan Design Chief Shiro Nakamura wasn’t as secretive as Matano — he blatantly pointed out his wall hanging to a group of 80 North American automotive journalists gathered in the hotel meeting room in this costal resort town about 17 miles west of Lisbon.

The sculpture represented, he said, a new Nissan that people would be seeing more of in the fall.