History
Welcome to the kind of car Nissan used to make. In this case, the kind of straightforward Focus-sized family hatchback the brand once sold here badged as a Sunny, or, until 2007, as the Almera. Other world markets knew these models by another name all along, one that in 2014 was at last adopted by Nissan for its return to the traditional C-segment in our market: that of the 'Pulsar'.
This, if you remember, was the kind of traditional compact family car that the company said prior to 2014 it wasn't going to bring us anymore. Instead, the end of Almera production marked the beginning of a brave new Crossover era for the brand as it ditched its traditional family hatch and medium range models and, to replace them, kick-started a genre that would become the fastest-growing segment in the automotive industry. That Crossover class, championed first by Nissan's Qashqai and later, by its smaller stablemate, the Juke, proved massively successful for the Japanese maker, so much so that it seemed this manufacturer's days of serving up conventional family-sized volume models were well and truly over.
Not so. By 2014, things were looking very different. Nissan's Alliance partner Renault had hobbled itself with a gamble on all-electric cars that wasn't paying off. To compensate, higher European sales targets were being set for a Nissan brand that was seeing its Crossover class leadership eroded by copycat models from almost every other mainstream maker. As a result, it was becoming increasingly clear to the company's hierarchy that the market share they were striving for wasn't going to be reached without an ordinary bread-and-butter C-segment Focus-sized contender. And, with Qashqai and Juke engineering and technology already providing the tools to quickly create such a thing, it was only a matter of time before a car like the Pulsar model we're going to look at here arrived in Nissan showrooms.
When that happened in late 2014, industry observers immediately expected something unique and avant garde, forgetting that the brand was already offering family buyers that sort of thing with its Crossovers. No, the Pulsar's job was to go after more conservative buyers, people not interested in fashion statements or perceived statements of lifestyle motoring. So, at launch, its attributes were more sensible ones: value, safety, comfort - and, most significant of all, class-leading space. These, the things you'd think would matter to folk in this segment, are the single-minded focus of a car designed to deliver then. This car sold until 2018.
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