NISSAN MICRA

Nissan plans to launch their next generation small car model Nissan March in 2010, in India. The Nissan March would mark Nissan’s entry into the automatic passenger car market.

Shouhei Kimura, Nissan Motor India managing director said: “It will be launched in the ‘A´ segment category in India and will have 80% of localization.”

At this point, there is no information on the number of cars to be produced for India, or on the price of the Nissan March when it is launched here. As an A-segment car, the March would be competing against the Hyundai Santo, Chevrolet Spark, the Hyundai i10 etc in India.

This might be a good car alright in the A-segment - but somehow those faux-Beetle looks are not very convincing. The front treatment is European - shoddy European, in my opinion. The rest is tolerable. But like Renault did with the Logan, changing the front grill design of the Nissan March to suit Indian tastes would not be too difficult.

The Nissan March will be manufactured at Nissan’s plant in Oragadam. The Nissan March is one of the nine cars that Nissan plans to launch in the Indian market - the company already sells the Nissan X-Trail SUV in India. Renault Nissan will invest Rs.40 billion ($833 million) in the plant, that would have a capacity to manufacture 4,00,000 cars every year for local and overseas markets.

Kimura also said that the Nissan March would be included in the 110,000 units that would be exported by the second half of 2010, following the signing of an MOU with Ennore Port Ltd.

Nissan plans to scale up the number of units for export to 1,80,000, over the next few years.