Quirky car to be built in Sunderland

Feb 5 2009 by Graeme King, The Journal

NISSAN has announced that the model to be built in its Sunderland plant will be known as the Qazana and will be a five door ‘crossover’ vehicle.

Little detail is available about the new car yet, but it is going to be debuted at the Geneva Motor Show next month.

The unveiling of the new vehicle will be welcome news for the thousands of workers at Nissan in Sunderland after a tough period of 1,200 redundancies being announced and shifts being cancelled to save money. The new Qazana is expected to support around 1,100 jobs and will replace the Micra, starting production in mid 2010 – though a spokesman for Nissan said yesterday the two vehicles were likely to be made simultaneously for a period.

Nissan says it will “challenge conventional wisdom” about what buyers expect of small five-door cars.

The concept car to be shown in Geneva is said to have a striking design dominated by large, wide wheelarches and a lower than average shape intended to give a feeling of strength, while the upper body is “dynamic, assertive and sporty.”

One quirky feature is that the rear doors apparently open the opposite way to conventional cars – what the car industry term “suicide doors”.

Qazana will reinforce Nissan’s position as a pioneer of ‘crossover’ vehicles which aim to straddle conventional dividing lines between different car models.

The company already makes the Murano and – in Sunderland – the Qashqai and recently introduced Qashqai+2.