Nissan primes Pulsar

Nissan Australia will announce the all-important pricing and specifications for its born-again Pulsar when the vital new small car makes its local debut at the Australian International Motor Show in Sydney on October 18.

As is the case with the slow-selling Tiida it will replace – and the majority of competitors in the booming small-car segment – the Pulsar sedan and hatch are expected to arrive with identical equipment levels and pricing structure, the latter opening at about $20,000.

Most of Nissan’s Sydney show limelight will be reserved for the new Pulsar sedan , which made its global debut at the Beijing show in April and will be the first Pulsar model to arrive here.

Expect Nissan’s new global small sedan, which motoring.com.au will drive for the first time on home soil in the lead-up to this year’s Sydney show, to arrive in Australian showrooms before Christmas, ahead of an official launch in January.

The new Pulsar hatchback, which may also debut in Sydney, will follow the sedan on sale around March. Also produced in Thailand but first seen at last year’s Shanghai show wearing Tiida badges , the five-door Pulsar should be the volume-seller in Nissan’s redesigned small car range.

Also making their Australian debuts on Nissan’s Sydney stand will be the compact Juke crossover, which is now odds-on for local release, an Australian-spec version of the new Patrol – pricing for which will also be released ahead of its January release – and, possibly, the all-new Pathfinder due on sale here next year.

Next month’s new Micra-based Almera light sedan and the new Altima large sedan, which replaces the Maxima here late next year and will form the basis of Nissan’s inaugural V8 Supercar race contender in 2013, will bookend these five all-new Nissan model in the next 12 months or so.

But it is the twin-pronged Pulsar attack on Australia’s largest single vehicle sales segment that will be the key planks in Nissan’s quest to claim a 10 per cent market share in Australia, where the Japanese brand also plans to usurp Mazda as the nation’s number one full-line importer.

Nissan is unlikely to achieve that before the end of its GT2012 five-year plan that ends in March 2013, however, given the second of two Pulsar derivatives only arrives that month.

The evergreen Mazda3 (priced from $20,330 in both hatch and sedan form) continues to be Australia’s most popular small car with a dominant 18.2 per cent share to July this year, followed by Toyota’s even older Corolla (both models from $20,990).

Holden’s locally built Cruze hatch and sedan is the country’s third best selling small car, but combined sales of the i30 hatch and Elantra sedan actually places Hyundai third in the small car segment, while Nissan’s Tiida is in a lowly 12th place with just 1977 sales and a paltry 1.4 per cent share so far this year – despite a cheap $18,990 entry price.

The Pulsar sedan and hatch will be positioned as two distinctly separate models, with different exterior and interior designs – similar to the way Toyota will differentiate its next Corolla hatch (which will also make its local debut in Sydney) from the sedan version that will follow around 12 months later.

The hatch has a more youthful design than the sedan, which will be sold in 120 countries by 2014 and looks like a smaller version of the Altima. It features a prominent side shoulder line and large-car styling elements like a heavily chromed grille, LED daytime-running lights and LED tail-lights.

Nissan also promises the Pulsar sedan interior will offer as much quality and space as anything in its class and first images of an overseas-spec model show a cream-coloured leather-lined cabin with a two-tone dashboard comprising a large central screen, digital climate controls, keyless starting and lashings of woodgrain trim.

Both Nissan small cars are likely to be powered by Nissan’s new 1.8-litre four-cylinder petrol engine, matched to both manual and optional continuously variable automatic (CVT) transmissions.

Finally, Nissan Australia openly admits it is looking at the prospect of topping its new Pulsar range with a born-again SSS-badged warm-hatch flagship, which would be a spiritual successor for the 2.0-litre N15 Pulsar SSS hatch last sold here in September 2000.

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