Nissan Unveils Plans For A Global Small Car, YOU Interested?

Nissan has revealed the first details of its new global small car project at a briefing at its new global headquarters in Yokohama, Japan.

The new ‘V-platform’ project has been designed primarily to make financial sense in emerging markets, while being sophisticated enough for Western Europe.

Usually, Nissan says, carmakers take an existing platform and de-content it for use in price sensitive emerging markets. This project sees a platform engineered primarily for emerging markets, being adopted for mature markets.....

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CarCrazedinCali - 10/20/2009 12:00:44 PM

-6 Boost

Death trap, most asian small cars are just death traps.... Rather a small car made by the Germans which would at least be fun to drive and have a real chance of saving your life in a wreck

_43LE - 10/20/2009 12:30:25 PM

+5 Boost

It's funny how people's perceptions are formed. In general, it seems that small cars no matter where they are made perform well in standard crash tests, but when crashed against varying sizes of other cars do not do well. Ford, Honda, Kia, Mazda, Nissan, Mitsubishi, Toyota, VW all performed well in iihs tests. In real world situations, small cars do not perform so well, regardless of where they are made.

http://www.iihs.org/ratings/default.aspx

and

http://www.usatoday.com/money/autos/2009-04-14-big-cars-safer_N.htm

thstone - 10/20/2009 5:04:03 PM

+1 Boost

The reason that small cars perform well in crash tests is that they crash into a stationary object. The force imparted on the vehicle is mostly a function of the mass of the vehicle, and for small vehicles, this means that the force is smaller.

However, when small vehicles are crashed into other, usually larger vehicles, then the mass of the other vehicle dominates the equation and the result is the smaller car is demolished.

In a land still dominated by millions of large SUV's, driving a very small car is crazy. Sure, you might survive a solo crash at 25mph, but when the soccer mom putting on makeup in her Navigator t-bones you in the intersection at 50mph, you're going to be seriously injured or dead, whereas if you were in an equal mass vehicle, you would probably only be bruised and/or maybe a broken bone.

chano129 - 10/22/2009 12:29:09 PM

+1 Boost

Renault have Good record for safety with small cars, nissan could get ideas from them, but I think nissan is more interesting in targeting fuel effeicency,as they promise to build a car that can travel 100kmwith 3 litres of gas.This is show me that nissan is building a next generation pao that they stop manufacture that could deliver up to 51 mpg (5.5 L/100 km) in the city and 79 mpg (3.4 L/100 km) at a steady 60 km/h (37 mph).