BASED ON THE NISSAN QAZANA, the Nis­san Juke is set to be unveiled at the upcom­ing Geneva Motor Show.

The Nis­san “Juke”

Clearly tak­ing on the cues of the quirky (that’s being diplo­matic) Qazana, the Dakar inspired Juke tones down the theme with slightly less com­i­cal wheel arches, but appears to retain the over­sized fog­lights and coupe-​​ish styling. Not much else is known, though full details will be released on Feb 10.

The car prob­a­bly won’t make it to North Amer­i­can or Aus­tralian mar­kets and will be pro­duced in the UK, no doubt aimed at the youth(and young at heart/​ just plain bizarre) market.

[Ed: I think Juke is a mis­pelling of Joke.]

PRESS RELEASE

7 Jan­u­ary 2010

JUKE: NISSAN’S NEW SMALL CROSSOVER

* Sales to begin in Autumn for Europe
* Extend­ing the Crossover phi­los­o­phy to the small car seg­ment
* Nissan’s fourth Crossover in Europe – rein­forc­ing Crossover lead­er­ship
* Man­u­fac­tured in UK

One month before its global media unveil on Feb­ru­ary 10th, Nis­san today con­firms the name of its forth­com­ing small Crossover. The Nis­san Juke will go on sale from Octo­ber, fol­low­ing its global pub­lic pre­mière at Geneva Motor Show in March.

The Nis­san Juke will inject some much-​​needed dynamism into the small car seg­ment, offer­ing Euro­pean car-​​buyers an alter­na­tive to the tra­di­tional, unin­spir­ing small hatch­back. As the fourth Crossover in Nissan’s Euro­pean range, “Juke” rein­forces the brand’s pio­neer­ing Crossover lead­er­ship in Europe.

The car was inspired by the Qazana con­cept car that received such a warm recep­tion at the 2009 Geneva Motor Show, and will fit into the Nis­san range between the Note com­pact fam­ily car and the Qashqai crossover.

Nissan’s cus­tomer research iden­ti­fied a large pro­por­tion of Euro­pean small and com­pact car buy­ers whose needs are not met by what they per­ceive to be unin­spir­ing and uno­rig­i­nal options avail­able to them where copy­cat hatch­backs dominate.

The Nis­san Juke has been designed and devel­oped to give cus­tomers an alter­na­tive to the tra­di­tional small hatch­back in Europe. We know that there are a lot of cus­tomers that are look­ing for a car which com­bines strik­ing design, agile han­dling and dri­ving plea­sure, user friendly tech­nol­ogy but not at the expense of prac­ti­cal­ity and con­ve­nience. These unique attrib­utes will allow Juke to occupy a unique cor­ner of the Euro­pean mar­ket,” said Simon Thomas, Nissan’s Euro­pean Senior Vice Pres­i­dent for Sales and Marketing.

“Nis­san caught the mood of the Euro­pean car-​​buying pub­lic with Qashqai crossover and we’ve worked hard to study the mar­ket in the same way for Juke to be sure we meet the needs of Euro­pean cus­tomers. We’re con­fi­dent that Juke will bring a new gen­er­a­tion of cus­tomers to Nis­san, in the same way that Qashqai did. Our phi­los­o­phy of chal­leng­ing con­ven­tions with Qashqai has been a huge suc­cess. We’ve just reached the 500,000 land­mark and we’re apply­ing many of the lessons learned from Qashqai to Juke. We’re con­fi­dent we’ll have another suc­cess on our hands,” added Simon Thomas.

Juke will be man­u­fac­tured along­side the Qashqai, Qashqai+2 and Note at Nissan’s state-​​of-​​the-​​art man­u­fac­tur­ing facil­ity in Sun­der­land, Great Britain.

With the intro­duc­tion of Murano in the US in 2003, the Crossover con­cept was intro­duced to con­sumers who were look­ing for a vehi­cle that com­bined the dynamic design and han­dling char­ac­ter­is­tics of a pas­sen­ger car, but with the added ben­e­fit of all-​​wheel drive trac­tion and the improved vis­i­bil­ity of a raised seat­ing posi­tion, but with­out the boxy shape of an SUV.

In Europe, the intro­duc­tion in 2007 of Nissan’s Qashqai her­alded the main­stream intro­duc­tion of the Crossover con­cept for the first time, pro­vid­ing an alter­na­tive to the tra­di­tional C-​​Segment offer­ing. In just over two-​​and-​​a-​​half years, and with a half-​​a-​​million buy­ers in Europe, cus­tomer feed­back shows they love its com­bi­na­tion of under­stated, but sophis­ti­cated design which com­bines the lower body robust­ness of an SUV, but the upper body pro­file of a pas­sen­ger car. Such has been demand for Qashqai that pro­duc­tion was increased at the plant in Sun­der­land, UK, to meet sup­ply. The Qashqai con­cept was fol­lowed by the intro­duc­tion of the stretched wheel­base ver­sion, the Qashqai+2, offer­ing extra inte­rior space allow­ing the inclu­sion of a third row of fold­ing seats to meet the needs of larger active fam­i­lies who need extra space or accommodation.

Details of forth­com­ing refresh­ments to the Qashqai were released ear­lier in December.

Full details of Juke will be released on 10th Feb­ru­ary 2010.

Honda have debuted the ini­tial ver­sion of the new Honda New Small Con­cept at the Delhi Auto Expo.

The car is designed specif­i­cally for the boom­ing Indian small car seg­ment, with the pro­duc­tion ver­sion expected to fetch around $12,000 with Honda work­ing to ensure the car is locally pro­duced to keep costs down in the highly com­pet­i­tive segment.

Details are sparse on the spec­i­fi­ca­tions for the new con­cept, but engine, econ­omy and appoint­ments are expected to exceed offer­ings from Volk­swa­gen and Maruti Suzuki, India’s cur­rent mar­ket leader to occupy a lux­ury tier of the small car segment.

Honda New Small Concept

 

Suzuki has piqued inter­est ever since the unveil­ing of the Kiza­shi con­cept back in 2007. After all, it’s not often we see a large car con­cept from the car­maker, known for it’s rally and motor­bike her­itage and a his­tory of com­pact (and very com­pe­tent) small cars.

The new Kiza­shi fol­lows some of the flow­ing lines we were shown with the Kiza­shi 2 con­cept, while clearly show­ing a refine­ment from the con­cept to an almost pro­duc­tion appear­ance. Gone are the daz­zling paint jobs, 4WD ride height, crossover sports wagon styling, and head­lights. Instead ver­sion 3 of the Kiza­shi rides on 21 inch, 9 spoke chrome wheels, sports a new, sharper head­light design, wider split grille, a more mus­cu­lar front end, and 350z style rear haunches becom­ing almost a 4 door sports car.

Along with the stun­ning styl­is­tic update come some juicy details. The new Kiza­shi will carry a 300HP ver­sion of the GM’s new DOHC 24-​​valve 3.6L V6, come with Suzuki’s advanced i-​​AWD sys­tem mated to a paddle-​​shifted 6 speed auto­matic trans­mis­sion and will com­fort­ably seat 5 persons.

It’s one of the most solid close-​​to-​​production con­cepts we’ve seen and Suzuki claims we will see pro­duc­tion of the Kiza­shi in some form in 2010, with con­struc­tion planned to be at Suzuki’s new Sagara plant in Japan. Here’s to see­ing Suzuki build this, and since we’re wish­ing, we might as well throw in a wish for the X-​​HEAD too.

Kiza­shi 3 Concept:

 

The Con­cept RA has appeared in Detroit look­ing like a cross between the new Lancer EVO and (per­haps) the lat­est gen­er­a­tion USDM Mit­subishi Eclipse, or even an Audi TT.

The strictly con­cept only (Sorry, guys and girls) Con­cept RA sports a 2.2 litre, DOHC 16-​​valve 150kw/​201HP/​420nm high out­put, clean burn diesel engine, as part of Mitsubishi’s new drive towards eco-​​friendly per­for­mance sports cars.

In order to achieve low con­sump­tion while not sac­ri­fic­ing per­for­mance means the Con­cept RA fea­tures Mitsubishi’s pro­pri­etary MIVEC vari­able valve con­trol tech­nol­ogy, an all alu­minum space frame, vari­able diffuser/​variable geom­e­try tur­bocharger, peizo­elec­tric injec­tor sys­tem and also sports some impact resis­tant, recy­clable plas­tic resin pan­els as part of it’s construction.

Envi­ron­men­tal fea­tures include a new cat­alytic con­verter sys­tem that com­bines a diesel oxi­da­tion cat­a­lyst (DOC), NOx trap cat­a­lyst (NTC) and diesel par­tic­u­late fil­ter (DPF) in addi­tion to the highly effi­cient 2.2 litre clean burn­ing diesel.

Of course, the Con­cept RA sports Full­time 4WD, Twin Clutch SST Trans­mis­sion, and the new S-​​AWC (Super-​​All Wheel Con­trol) most notably seen on the new EVO. As men­tioned before on IJ, S-​​AWC is a com­bi­na­tion of exist­ing tech­nolo­gies, Active Cen­ter Dif­fer­en­tial, Active Yaw Con­trol, ABS and Active Sta­bil­ity Control.

Unfor­tu­nately though, all this is to be shelved as the car is designed purely as a con­cept, and won’t chal­lenge either Honda’s offer­ing in the new CRZ (CRX) or Toyota’s rumored new ‘AE86’.

 

It turns out that Mit­subishi Europe has qui­etly released details on the Ral­liart Lancer.

Mit­subishi doesn�t state whether the Ral­liart will be based on the 4door Lancer or the upcom­ing 5door hatch, how­ever Carscoop states the USDM Ral­liart will be based on 4 door lancer sedan, whereas Europe will get the 5 door hatch. Since Aus­tralia clas­si­cally gets the clos­est equiv­a­lent on the JDM, we can expect to see the 4 door on our roads.

The Ral­liart is expected to run a detuned 177KW, 240PS ver­sion of the EVO X 2.0L, dual valve VVT turbo 4 cylin­der. Cou­pled to this is the mag­nif­i­cent 6-​​speed Twin Clutch SST trans­mis­sion, and AWD with Active Cen­tre Dif­fer­en­tial and Active Yaw Control.

The final form of the Ral­liart in Aus­tralia is unknown, but given the com­pe­ti­tion between Sub­aru and Mit­subishi in this seg­ment we can expect the Ral­liart to slot firmly into posi­tion against the stan­dard Sub­aru Impreza WRX — leav­ing the Evo X to tackle the WRX STi.

Being some­what given to fan­tasy here at IJ, we’d love to see that Sport­back con­cept repro­duced in full for the hatch­back. Given the stan­dard new Lancer is being hailed as a run­away suc­cess for Mitsu, a return of the Ral­liart Lancer is sure to be noth­ing less than a added cream in Mitsu’s prof­its in an age of high demand for fast, small, fuel effi­cient cars.

[Source: Carscoop]