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Report: Nissan To Introduce Low Price Subcompact
21 September 2007
The Nikkei reports that Nissan Motor has decided to start selling a subcompact car priced at around ¥800,000-900,000 (US$6,900-7,800) in Japan as early as 2009 in an attempt to stem the tide of growing minicar sales.
At this price level, this car will likely be the cheapest on the domestic market—except for minicars, which are powered by engines 660cc or smaller.
While new-car sales in Japan remain weak, minicar sales have continued to grow, thanks to their prices and low maintenance costs. Minicars accounted for 35% of new-car sales in 2006, up 11 percentage points from a decade earlier.
Nissan’s low-priced subcompact will likely feature a 1- to 1.3-liter-class engine, applied in a platform Nissan has been developing with Renault for Low Price Vehicles for emerging markets. Nissan may also import a large proportion of key components from Thailand and elsewhere.
Nissan currently sells minicars that it sources from Suzuki.
September 21, 2007 in Brief | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)
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Comments
Lets hope it is a good one - as good as the Toyota Aygo.
The problem with cars is that they tend to expand over time. The current Micra is larger than the previous version and so on.
So they have to insert a new car at the bottom of the range.
If people just downsized their cars, you could forget biofuels until they had figured out ones that were GHG positive.
Posted by: mahonj | Sep 22, 2007 1:55:40 AM
mahonj
GHG positive fuel when burned in an ICE vehicle? Will that ever exist?
Which combination is the closest to that goal?
Posted by: Harvey D | Sep 22, 2007 8:33:25 AM
I mean GHG positive wrt fossil fuel, such as conventional gasoline or diesel.
Nothing special, just a biofuel that really generates less GHG than the equivalent fossil fuel.
There seems to be so much debate on biofuels, what with crops releasing NO2 and so on.
Posted by: mahonj | Sep 22, 2007 1:22:26 PM
