New Micra has landed

The smallest car in the Nissan line-up has a big job on its hands.

The new Micra hatchback is the car that Nissan believes will start its massive sales drive over the next two years.

Nissan has an ambitious target to overtake Mazda and Hyundai in the new-car sales race by March 2013 -- even though both of those rival brands have ambitious targets of their own.

To overtake them at current sales rates Nissan needs to at least triple or quadruple the number of Micras it sells -- and get a similar increase from the Tiida small car replacement when it arrives about a year from now.

For that reason, the Micra range has expanded from one model with one engine and transmission, to three models with a choice of two engines and two transmissions.

It also partly explains why Nissan has launched the Micra to the media three times in the past four weeks.

At the official (and final) launch of the car in Melbourne this week, the boss of Nissan Australia Dan Thompson repeated his plans for Nissan to put a dent in Mazda and Hyundai sales.

“We've relied on our commercial vehicles too much in recent years; we've only been truly participating in about one-third of the [new-car] market," he said. “So absolutely it's possible we can get this growth."

The new Micra is available with a choice of a 1.2 three-cylinder or 1.5 four-cylinder petrol engines -- both with either a four-speed auto or five-speed manual transmission.

There are three model grades -- ST, ST-L and Ti -- but all come with six airbags and stability control as standard.

Nissan only displayed drive-away pricing for the base model manual ($13,990 drive-away), so adding approximately $1000 to the RRP should give a close indication of the drive-away pricing for each model.

The new Micra arrives in showrooms December 1.

Visit the Carsales Network again for our drive review of the new Nissan Micra.

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