I hope Nissan comes out of its funk

Sometimes I travel for work and this week I’m renting again because my winter beater shit the bed (and I got a very good rental rate). My normal daily is a 2019 MX-5 6MT, my winter an 07 Volvo S60.

This year I’ve also driven for extended periods (all automatic, mid spec, late MY) the Corolla, Camry, Civic, Sonata, Malibu, Versa, Sentra, C Class, and this week an Altima. I usually rent the smallest thing I can get my mitts on. It’s impressive how far modern commodity cars have come even from when I was a kid.

Now I do have gripes with the CVTs (especially in low power cars) and the numb steering in everything but the Versa and Civic, but of the bunch I’ve rented the Nissans were consistently my favorite.

Nissan clearly has people who care and the ingredients for great cars. While it’s easy to laugh at Nissan corporate’s failures, Nissan could recover and live up to their legacy if they’re able to move past the CVT and inject a little fun into their cars.

They had supportive and well padded seats reminiscent of the GOATs of the 90s and 00s, they’re quiet inside (unlike the Civic, holy cow), great ergonomics and controls layouts, actual needle gauges and screens that don’t have gimmicks. And they all had high steering angle racks, which made urban driving and parking very easy. Nissan has the ingredients for fun cars, aside from its lacking power and CVT the Versa was actually pretty fun to drive because it had good feedback. It was a riot in SoCal and so much improved over the previous generation (I used to own a 2016).

Here’s hoping to a bright future for the company.