MATT WEAVER, VICE-PRESIDENT, NISSAN DESIGN EUROPE

How do you update a car without spoiling what made it a success?

“It’s absolutely terrifying. [It’s a little bit down to] working groups we have within the bigger company. Those departments, like market intelligence and planning, are very clever and have lots of ways to study. Of course, we don’t want to get too caught up in that. But we do use the MAYA rule – the ‘most advanced yet acceptable’. We use it and study it. We always want to be on the leading edge of that. We study where what we’re doing will be in three to four years’ time, rather than researching what it will be at launch.”

Does this pave the way for something more radical?

“I hope so. I think it has to. We stopped calling [the facelift] a minor change quite early on in the programme, because we thought this was actually quite a major change. The automotive landscape is changing very rapidly for a number of different reasons. So I think there’s a great acceptance in our company to not take half steps at the moment, to push forwards.”

Lots of your rivals are turning to retro designs. Is that sustainable?

“Obviously not, because we’d just be going backwards in time until we’ve made a [Ford] Model T. I’ve gone in and out of phases... Maybe there is a time and a place now where some things should be recognisable, which is where retrofuturism could come in. If a product comes and many things are different, maybe it’s good to have that tangible thing that makes you think: ‘I remember that, I feel warmth from this’.”