We Canadians like our compact cars – that’s why the Honda Civic, Hyundai Elantra, Volkswagen Golf, Toyota Corolla and Ford Focus have all consistently traded the top sales top at some point or another.
However those cars have grown in size. The current generation Honda Civic is now the size that the old Accord was.
The good news is that allows automakers to slip in smaller product underneath their compact offerings and in Canada especially that means lots of sales.
Sub-compact cars are doing well here but there’s also a market in the microcar segment as the Mini Cooper, Fiat 500, Chevrolet Spark and Scion IQ have demonstrated. It seems that Nissan wants a piece of the pie and it wouldn’t cost a whole lot since the Micra already exists overseas.
Right now Nissan is touring Canadian dealerships showing off the newly designed Rogue, but they also brought the Micra with them, which currently is not sold here. Now why would they do that?
Nissan said they have yet to make a decision on whether they plan to re-sell the Micra in the Canadian market (the Micra used to be sold on our shores up until 1991) but Autoguide.com claims a dealer source confirmed the return and it would happen mid-2014.
With Mitsubishi re-introducing the Mirage, it seems more and more likely that Nissan would follow suit.
Currently the Micra is sold with a 1.2 litre supercharged three cylinder engine. That engine likely wouldn’t make it over as Nissan would probably opt to put in a non-supercharged version.
Another interesting point is how Nissan would price the Micra. Right now Nissan claims among the cheapest new cars sold in Canada with the Versa sedan (which starts at just under $12,000) so the Micra would have to come in under that making it possible to be one of the first sub $10K cars sold in Canada.
Do you think Nissan should sell the Micra on our shores?
