These days, Saikawa is focused again on the mobility world.
His new passion is slow-speed, autonomous mobility for congested cities, a field hot for consulting in Japan. Saikawa said he has been approached by several companies but declined to name them.
Saikawa believes dense urban areas will evolve into geofenced zones where personal cars are banned. People will instead hop into leased or fleet-operated pod cars that drive themselves, offer privacy, run purely on electricity and are “light, soft and cozy,” for greater pedestrian safety.
“This is my dream,” he said. “In autonomous driving, everybody tries to make a car that moves autonomously in congested areas but can still go 90 mph on a winding highway.
“Do we really need this? Why not separate the two?”
Saikawa’s mobility views piggyback on his experience with autonomous driving and electrification at Nissan, as well as more recent consulting jobs in artificial intelligence. This year, he participated in an information technology project in Vietnam.
Software and infrastructure, not vehicle hardware, Saikawa said, will be the driving forces behind this new business. “This is what I was convinced of while I was at Nissan,” he said.
On the night of Ghosn’s arrest in November 2018, Saikawa lashed out at his alliance boss as the mastermind of long-running wrongdoing. In retirement, Saikawa sounds more charitable.
While he is “convinced” of Ghosn’s guilt, Saikawa wants people to also remember Ghosn’s other legacy — that he saved Nissan and built an international auto juggernaut.
“He was still the irreplaceable leader of the alliance, even if a little remote from day-to-day operations,” Saikawa said. “I respect what he did in the early days.”