Nissan will put Nismo to work on high-performance EVs

With Nissan drawing combustion engine development to a close, one question mark that's been lingering is what the company plans to do with Nismo. For nearly 40 years the company's in-house motorsports and tuning shop has churned out some of the wildest street-legal engines in the world. Currently, it's responsible for the 600-horsepower Nissan GT-R Nismo, heritage parts for now-classic Skyline GT-Rs, and handling packages on some of the company's more mundane offerings.

However, Nismo will not go quietly into that EV night, according to Top Gear. "It's not a gimmick," Nissan's European chairperson Guillaume Cartier told the British outlet at a recent Formula E race. "To use an English expression, it’s not lipstick on a pig."

Nissan plans to spend $17.7 billion introducing 23 electrified cars in the next five years, with 15 of them running solely on battery juice. Cartier says the Yokohama-based company is in the process of determining which of these vehicles would be best suited for the Nismo treatment. Among the concepts Nissan has shown, one called the Max-Out is an AWD, open-top, EV sports car.