can someone explain the nissan meme to me
why are they associated with retards? is this an american thing? why did it end up this way?
Back in the late 1990s, after Japan's bubble economy bursted, Nissan was in severe financial trouble and was on the verge of bankruptcy. Their cars at the time were known for great quality, almost rivaling Toyotas at the time, but they didn't make money from them. Then, a French-Lebanese Brazilian named Carlos Ghosn, who was also working at Renault, formed a partnership with Nissan to get them financially back on track. Ghosn was credited for saving Nissan, but did it in ways that involved severe cost cutting and focusing heavily on quantity over quality. In the 2000s, Nissan started offering loans with requirements so low that all you needed was just a pulse to get a new car. Nissan also sold a lot of cars for fleet use in places like for rental cars.
In the late 2010s, Ghosn was arrested by the Japanese Police for charges of embezzlement, but Ghosn managed to smuggle himself out of Japan in a musical instrument box, and lives in exile in Lebanon, which does not have an extradition treaty with Japan. The reaction to Ghosn's original arrest was mixed, as some people agreed that he needed to be jailed for embezzlement, while others think that Nissan set up Ghosn to be the fall guy as they didn't want a foreigner to run a Japanese company. And the irony about the latter is that Nissan currently has a foreigner CEO, as Ivan Espinoza took over after Makoto Uchida resigned due to issues like Nissan's current financial troubles.
The Nissan Altima in particular became the standout car for the Nissan memes because of how often you see them with body damage, and how reckless their drivers are, and that also lead to the term "Big Altima Energy" being coined about those smashed-up Altimas. The Altima is also popular with Black and Hispanic people, because of how cheap it is to get one.
It's gotten to the point that people rarely buy Nissans because they want one, but they only buy them because they couldn't get qualified for loans on any other car. And their RWD cars, i.e. the 350Z, 370Z, Infiniti G35, G37, and Q50, are popular with people that want to clap out cars and turn them into drift missiles, because they have ton of horsepower and are cheap compared to other RWD cars.
And Nissan also started attracting idiots when their cars (namely the Skyline GT-R and Nissan 350Z) appeared in the Fast and the Furious movies, since people wanted to become something like the next Paul Walker.
Outside of the US, there are some cars that are also known for the Nissan memes, i.e. the Qashqai (aka Crashqai) in the UK and EU, the Patrol in Middle East countries, the Sylphy (Sentra) in China, and the Tsuru in Mexico, which was a early 1990's era Sentra that Nissan sold there all the way until
2017, and only stopped because it wouldn't pass the new crash test requirements.