Virus Won't Stop the Rogue, Nissan Says
With assembly plants shut down in North America and overseas, supply chains thrown into disarray, and workers and salaried employees either furloughed or working from home, it’s only natural to question the timing of future products.
When it comes to Nissan’s bread and butter, you needn’t bother. The automaker says virus or no, the next-generation Rogue will land in the fall as planned.
As reported by Automotive News, Nissan responded to a report in Nikkei Business Daily — which suggested the automaker was ready to postpone the launch of the third-generation model — by saying the fall introduction will go ahead.
Never has the near future been more shrouded in uncertainty, but fall seems distant enough to imagine workers in Smyrna, Tennessee heading to the Nissan plant in droves, as per normal. The same goes for U.S. buyers and their local dealership. It’s possible that the coronavirus epidemic will have run most of its course by that point, though history could show this to be wishful thinking.
Regardless, at some point the public health-mandated social distancing measures will ease, and buyers and lessees will find themselves needing new wheels. And at Nissan, the Rogue is the vehicle most likely to find a buyer. Introduced for the 2008 model year and returned in second-gen form in 2014 (a refresh came for 2017), the compact Rogue and its smaller Rogue Sport stablemate made up a quarter of the brand’s first-quarter U.S. sales volume.
That brand-wide volume, by the way, was down 30 percent over Q1 2019.
The upcoming Rogue is expected to grow slightly in size while donning a butchier set of clothes — all the better to do battle with the newly brawny (looking) Toyota RAV4. Given Nissan’s prowess with electrified propulsion, a plug-in hybrid could be in the offing. The current-gen Rogue, of course, will be remembered for fielding one of the least memorable hybrids to ever grace the market — a barely-there product that vanished seemingly as quickly as it appeared.
[Image: Nissan]
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Perhaps it's just me but there hasn't been a Nissan that has triggered any interest in me in at least two decades. Well, save for the Frontier that's about to be updated into something that I probably won't want. Somehow, Nissan has managed to make its cars homely and boring at the same time - and has graced nearly every one of them with a CVT that is known to be one of the most problematic on the market. To each his or her own, but unless Nissan is the only one who'll give you the loan, I can't see how one would opt for almost any of the company's vehicles given the superior competition that's out there.
What will? Asking for a friend.