Are You Ready for a Duster Based SUV from Nissan?

Well, when we all know about Duster‘s success story, and the huge waves it created before and after its launch. We still have instances of 6 months waiting periods for some variants.

Now this Renault-Nissan Joint Venture is working on an SUV which will come under the Nissan badge. Previously, we witnessed a couple of products under this rebadged engineering.

First we saw the Nissan Micra which was launched under the Renault badge as ‘Pulse’. The Pulse is priced a bit higher than the Micra and carries a different face. Recently, we saw the slightly modified Nissan Sunny coming under the name of Renault Scala.

Till now, we have seen Renault taking products from Nissan’s line-up, tweaking and re-badging them and launching them in India with a different name. Now, it’s the first time that Nissan is re-badging a Renault product. Though, sources say that Renault might delay this sharing until 2014 as Duster was the first ‘huge success’ for Renault in India and it literally helped the company to build a strong brand-presence in the country.

Mr. Colin Dodge, Nissan’s executive Vice President, revealed to Autocar India that Nissan’s version of the Duster will go beyond badge engineering. “We’ve got quite a differentiated car and the differences are far more significant than on the V-platform products (Micra/Pulse and Sunny/Scala). The hood and the fenders have differences and the bumpers are different too. But it’s more than just a bumpers and grille change for sure”.

The most exciting thing is, Nissan’s version of the Duster could be cheaper than the Renault Duster, provided the hierarchy of the Renault – Nissan JV is followed in this case. If Nissan can iron out the few ‘bad bits’ from Duster and launch it at a more competitive price, are we looking at a bigger success story?

 

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Source: Autocar India

Arghya Pan

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