Why Nissan is one of our top-selling brands

There’s something about the Nissan brand that really resonates with our customers. It’s one of our most popular brands overall and several Nissan models are among our individual top sellers.

A reputation for reliability has something to do it. Nissan consistently appears in the top spots of reliability tables in New Zealand and around the world. It was a very well-publicised number one in Consumer NZ’s annual report in 2019, which relies not just on raw data but also owner feedback.

But Nissan is not alone among Japanese makers in offering excellent reliability. There must be more to it. What is it that makes a used Nissan car such an attractive prospect for our customers?

Enterprise customers with their Nissan Note

An eye for emerging trends

Nissan has always had a great eye for identifying emerging trends and giving itself time to create the right products for the right markets. That means you’ll easily find a Nissan vehicle to suit your current lifestyle and needs.

That might mean simply keeping pace with changing tastes in a particular genre, such as the ever-growing love of utes. A Nissan ute like the Navara has always served up the right combination of toughness, tow-ability and on-road fuel efficiency and ride/handling to stay relevant to a demanding group of buyers for years.

Look at a Nissan SUV and it’s likely it won’t just be keeping pace with changing trends; with models like the Nissan X-Trail and Qashqai the company identified the explosion of “crossover” type SUVs early on. Nissan was one of the first mainstream carmakers to start offering SUV-type vehicles that could genuinely replace hatchbacks, sedans and station wagons, offering equivalent fuel economy and driving dynamics, but with even more family-friendly space and versatility.

That innovation extends to Electric Vehicles (EVs). The Nissan Leaf was the first truly mainstream and affordable pure-EV in the world, anticipating the global movement towards these types of vehicles by many years. For a long time the Leaf was the best-selling pure-EV in the world (overtaken only recently by the much more expensive Tesla Model 3), creating an enormous pool of used vehicles to make this technology more accessible to a broad range of car buyers. It’s the type of eco-friendly Nissan car NZ customers have really embraced.

Nissan Murano SUV

Making the right technology work across different models

One of the secrets to creating a portfolio of cars that combine desirability with efficiency and reliability is to identify the right technology, perfect it and then use it across many different models, reducing the cost and therefore ultimately making high-tech products more affordable for buyers. This gives them products that deliver great service over a very long period of time without unnecessary maintenance and repair bills.

For example, Nissan was a pioneer of Continuously Variable Transmission (CVT) in the 1990s. It initially seemed quite complex: a gearbox that didn’t have set ratios, but instead constantly moved up and down to keep the engine at the optimum speed for the driving situation. Result: the best blend of performance and fuel efficiency.

CVT has been a staple of Nissan vehicles now for over two decades and has brought the same set of strengths to a multitude of different models, from the X-Trail to the Nissan Murano.

The same is true of the core AWD technology used in most of Nissan’s crossover SUVs – including the Qashqai, X-Trail and Murano. The “on-demand” drivetrain uses 2WD when appropriate, but can seamlessly change to AWD on low-traction surfaces. Many Nissan SUV models also offer a 50/50 front/rear lock to allow the vehicles to tackle more demanding terrain.

Left to right: Nissan X-Trail, Nissan Murano and Nissan Navara

Nissan belongs a massive global group of carmakers

It’s a complement to think of Nissan as one of Japan’s big car brands. But in fact it’s much more than that: a key player in one of the largest automotive groups in the world, meaning it has access to global resources to help it design and manufacture vehicles.

In 1999 Nissan joined forces with Renault to form the “Renault-Nissan Alliance”, which quickly became known simply as the Alliance. It wasn’t just a case of one company taking over the other: it was a complex arrangement of cross-shareholdings that allowed the companies to retain their independence, but collaborate where it could mutually benefit both.

The Alliance was unique in the global car industry at the time and ultimately accounted for one in every nine cars sold worldwide. In 2016 Mitsubishi also joined the Alliance, and the group now also has partnerships with Daimler in Germany and Dongfeng in China.

What that means for the used car buyer is a choice of well-proven, thoroughly developed and reliable vehicles that have been designed to fulfill the wants and needs of an incredibly broad range of motorists. A company like Nissan can cheery-pick the best features from the entire group to create the best possible car, SUV or ute. And clearly it has.

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