It was only in July that Ivan Espinosa, Nissan's head of global product strategy, said he was looking to build the business case for a modern Silvia being launched as a third sports car to join the Z and GT-R.
Now he's revealed to Australian media, including Drive, that Nissan is already plotting an architecture for the car, which he said would have to be electrified, though whether he meant a hybrid or electric wasn't confirmed.
“We've been doing some very early upstream exercises of what the architecture could look like,” he said. “You need to find something that can work globally in order to have enough scale.”
Espinosa said making the car electrified will require significant investment, and that this is what is proving difficult at the moment. One possibility would be increasing economies of scale by sharing the car's technology with other members of the Renault Nissan Mitsubishi Alliance, he said.
Despite his positive tone, Espinosa said he still wasn't sure whether the project would get the green light, but if it did he would like to see the car launched before the end of the decade.
The Silvia has traditionally been Nissan's entry-level sports car. It was last sold in the U.S. during the 1990s as the 240SX, and Nissan discontinued the model globally in 2002.
Rumors of the Silvia's return date back to almost when the last Silvia bowed out of production. A Nissan designer from Europe also reignited things in 2021 when he presented design sketches for a vision of an electric Silvia.
A major hurdle for the Silvia is that Nissan also needs to invest in a new GT-R. The current R35 generation bows out after the 2024 model year and Nissan said that a successor is coming, albeit possibly with a gap of several years.
