Paul Doubya, do you have any idea what you’re talking about? The Micra has fantastic reliability! It rates highly in reliability tests and if you go to user review websites, hardly anybody has a bad thing to say about them. Renault components are actually pretty high quality. The latest models have been doing really well in reliability stakes.

Why does everybody have such a problem with this car? OK, you may not like the looks, can’t say I’m a fan either but it’s a good car and a good alternative. For a seven year old model, it’s doing pretty well considering that it doesn’t feel that dated and safety is pretty good when you buy the City Collection model. It also has something that so fewer Japanese cars have: character. The Mazda 2 is just dull, the Yaris really feels mass produced and the Swift was never class leader. The Micra deserves sales.
I could understand peoples hatred of it if it was expensive, bad quality, terrible to drive and completely impractical but the fact is that it’s cheap, pretty good quality, good to drive considering it’s a 1.4 with a four speed auto and it has massive amounts of space. It’s a good car, just because it’s ugly doesn’t mean one should discount it as terrible and one of the worst thing to ever happen to the motoring world.

At the time I thought that model vaguely looked kind of like a modern interpretation of a mini.

It was a great car, wonderful 5speed manual gearshift, heaps of space in the interior, revvy engine, nice airy feel and great visibility. It handled the awful Irish B roads and tight village laneways like a dream. Super easy to park as well.

When they brought that model out in Aus I thought it would be a winner but I remember the price killed it.

This newer model is not a blokes car… I cant see myself willingly wanting to drive this chicks car with an auto around the emerald isle…

by name and nature.sto dualis has vdc,tcs,ebd and a, 6 airbags,and 5 star euro crash rating.70% of its weight is in the floorplan for goodness sake.look it up at nissan.com.au

A friend of mine said to me the other day, hmmm I am thinking of buying a new car and I’ve got it down to two I liked, a Nissan Micra or a Honda Jazz, she knows I have penchant for Hondas as, like Toyota they are still truly independent with their engineering, not influenced by the likes of GM or Renault, God forbid.

She asked me what I thought of the Micra, I said it used to be a reasonable little car, built in the UK and had OK components and looked inoffensive. I also said Nissan makes me nervous as much of their current crop is influence by Renault and uses cheap components (no one please argue over this as I know where the wiring looms come from and a lot of the relays and so called 20 cent parts which is what has stranded many a pulsar and patrol owner of recent times).

This new Micra I described as a clowns car, utterly hideous and if its the sign of things to come, not only will I shy away from Nissan products because of the poor components going into them, but the design speaks for itself. My friend response was, “but the Micra must be better its made in Japan and the Jazz comes from Thailand”, well its true the Micra comes from Japan as far as I know, but it is full of cheapie parts that have a 5-10 year useful life, so be warned, the Honda still uses the good bits even though the Thais screw them together.

In many parts of Asia and Europe Nissan has a bad name for reliability and quality when it was being run on the smell of an oily rag.

Let the buyer beware of men in clown suits.

Jake02, the Note is larger so really should have been introduced instead of the awful Tiida.