You could argue that for all of Nissans aggressive product growth lately, they had somehow forgotten about the sizeable B hatchback segment. The new Nissan Micra falls into a sub B segment in our opinion. Locally in South Africa we’ve had the Nissan for the masses, the Tiida, plying its trade in the segment for some years now, but that is hardly a car to get excited about, except of course if you were a tourist at the Budget Rent-a-car desk.
News from Japan is that a new, ‘global,’ B segment hatchback has been unveiled by Nissan. It’s called the Note and if it is indeed on its way to South Africa, something we can neither confirm nor deny from Nissan South Africa at this stage, it will probably only be arriving in the middle-to-late part of 2013.
The new Note is based on the Invitation Concept we saw at the Geneva Motor Show this year and will ride on Nissan’s V-platform, which amongst other things, currently underpins the Indian built Micra.
We thoroughly enjoyed the look of the Nissan Invitation Concept with its hot hatch stance, piercing lights and flared wheel arches, but the first pictures of the JDM Note don’t look quite as seductive or sporty. It looks very much like a Nissan take on the Honda Jazz with its tall, mini-MPV cabin. Talk on the web is that a more aggressive body kitted and black honeycomb grilled Note will be available in the UK (and hopefully in South Africa too). We hope that isn’t just hopeful conjecture.
Underneath the bonnet, the new JDM Note will get a range of petrol engines with and without forced induction. One of which will be the 1.2 litre, 3-cylinder from the Micra, with a supercharger. Nissan are calling it a 1.2 DIG-S engine and it should produce 72 kW and CO2 emissions of only 99g / km.
The most noteworthy news for us in sunny South Africa is that the new Nissan Note will be built at Nissan’s high-class facility in Sunderland, in the UK.
