Blog Post: Paris Report Part 3: Nissan's Nuvo is a Better Place

by Martin Schwoerer

Published: October 2nd, 2008

blog post paris report part 3 nissan s nuvo is a better place

Nissan’s concept cars have been pretty impressive for the past few motor shows. There was the Pivo, a toyish-but-feasible city car that had electric motors in the wheel hubs, enabling it to do 360-degree turns. It was a bubbly, friendly vision of driving in the future. Then Nissan presented the Mixim, which looked like Darth Vader’s mask on wheels. The idea was to make an urban electric car that looked serious, even aggressive. Both owed their design language to Mangas, guaranteeing a certain attractiveness to teenagers. Today in Paris, Nissan unveiled the Nuvo which is equally electric and inspired by Japanese comic books, but in addition integrates nature-oriented themes such as flowers, and recycled materials. I like it, despite its megalomaniac motto claiming it’s “the future of the city car”. Any car that sports a new design language has my sympathies. The Nuvo is a 3+1, comparable in packaging to the Toyota iQ. Nuvo is to be rolled out in the context of the Better Place pilot projects in Denmark and Israel 2011. The Nissan guy I spoke with claims the agressive style of the Mixim doesn’t work for urban drivers, so they had to go for something softer. This may be true for Japan and some countries in Europe, but otherwise I would beg to differ: Germans find cuteness alarmingly unserious, and Americans feel emasculated by anything distinctly unmacho. Still, it’s a fine design.

Martin Schwoerer

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2 of 11 comments

Joeaverage on Oct 02, 2008

Reminds me of the GEM (Chrysler) Pea-pod. Go for it. Build it. See if anyone will buy it. Oh - this is a concept car? Oh - forgot. They seldom ever get built. Even the good ones. I'm really only interested in the car show vehicles that are really reaching the market. How about skipping the concept cars and have all these companies revealing new products they are actually taking deposits for? Maybe we'd all notice how much of the same new cars can though if we weren't distracted by concept cars. Not trying to be a grump - just saying most products are really good and we're down to differences in details. Now if somebody would release cars that were from the 30s down to their side opening hoods then we'd be talking different. Won't happen I suppose b/c retro is a tough one to pull off year after year.

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Usta Bee on Oct 02, 2008

This thing makes the Yaris look pretty good.

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