Performance Matters

Earlier last month, CarWale drove the Nissan Micra and got some first impressions on the car (Click here to read earlier comprehensive review). With the performance of the Micra being one of the main points of discussion on our forum, Nissan India were kind enough to lend us a Micra for a quick performance run so we could bring you some figures. The Nissan Micra comes with a 1.2-litre, three cylinder petrol engine, which is part of their new series of three and four cylinder engines.

Nissan has been working on a project called ‘Nissan Green Project 2010’ (NGP 2010) which is basically an initiative taken by the Japanese car manufacturer to reduce the carbon footprint of its cars. The company has been working relentlessly to make its engines more efficient and is slowly moving closer to zero emissions. The Nissan Micra is the first car to have a HR12DE engine, which has a cubic capacity of 1198cc. This three cylinder petrol engine churns out 75bhp at 6000rpm and produces a maximum torque of 104Nm at 4000rpm. Just for those of you who’d like to know, the bore is 78mm and the stroke is 83.6mm. Add one more cylinder and you have the HR16DE engine which is basically a 1.6-litre engine that Nissan will use on its other international models.

Nissan engine designers have succeeded in keeping the NVH levels low, especially while idling – which is generally the issue with most of the three cylinder engines as the vibration levels are higher due to balance issues. These new engine blocks are now machined by a method called bore circularity which has helped reduce friction by 20% if compared to a conventional four-cylinder engine. This helps to increase the power output, fuel efficiency and even the life of the engine; which in short makes the engine rev freely while making it quicker and reliable too.

Like any Japanese petrol engine, this engine revs freely close to its 7000rpm redline. Plant your right foot on the accelerator and the car starts pulling seamlessly above 2000rpm. During our initial drive of the Nissan Micra earlier, we had reported that there was a slight flat spot just past the 2000rpm mark. However, the press demonstrator we tested didn’t seem to have so much of a flat spot, but you do feel a very slight hesitation before the revs really rise. For most drivers, this is quite imperceptible but the more attuned will notice it. In our acceleration run, the car did a 100kph in 15 seconds and a quarter mile in 19.6 seconds in less than perfect conditions.

Nissan has got the gearing of the Micra spot-on for city as well as highway driving. The gear knob is just the right size and gearshifts as reported earlier are short, making quick shifts easier. In our in-gear runs, the Micra did the 30-50kph dash in 6 seconds in the third gear and it took 8.3 seconds to do it in the fourth. With the fifth gear being the overdrive, the Nissan Micra took 11.1 seconds to do the 50-70kph run. The Micra in international markets comes with an autobox in the form of a  CVT (continuously variable transmission) designed specifically for this petrol engine. Nissan, at present has no plans to get the CVT, but we believe it will be an excellent option for city drivers as it reduces driver fatigue and make the Nissan Micra even more of an urban car than it already is. We strongly believe that Nissan India should look at a CVT option and even though the numbers may not be very attractive, we think it would be a killer package.

While not too many of us may be overly concerned about the Nissan Micra’s outright performance, we all are concerned about fuel economy – in other words ‘average kya hai?’ While we couldn’t do a proper highway driving-cycle (since the car was available to us for a short time) we did manage to get a city cycle figure, albeit in very heavy traffic with lower moving average speeds. The Micra like most petrol engines of this class, returned about 10.5kpl in heavy city traffic (with the air-con running, of course) and the worst fuel economy we got was 9.87kpl in our performance run, which was all pedal-to-metal driving at three digit speeds.

The Micra feels nimble and light to drive which is a real boon in urban traffic conditions. The combination of a light steering, short and positive gearshifts, light clutch action and a peppy engine make the Nissan Micra quite an ideal urban commuter. The ride of the hatch is well composed at low and high speeds, and the cabin is fairly well insulated from the outside noise. However, it doesn’t insulate you from the outside world as some other European hatchbacks do. Drive it around tight corners quickly, and your confidence does reduce a little if you’re used to larger Euro hatches. There’s no perceivable shortage of grip but it does have a little body roll and this is because the car suspension is tuned more towards ride comfort over outright handling. To our dismay, the steering doesn’t weigh up at higher speeds as much as we’d like and it feels a little artificial and this could also boil down to the fact that the Micra is a much lighter car. The brake pedal on the Micra has fairly good feel and they bite progressively. Our test car wasn’t a top of the line (we got the XL trim), so it lacked ABS, EBD and BA. However, in our braking test, the Micra came to a complete standstill from a speed of 80kph in just 34.8m in less than ideal test conditions and felt confident throughout the few hard braking runs we did . The 165/70 R14 MRF ZVTV tyres (a new tread pattern from MRF) on our test car ran fairly quiet and had good wet weather traction too.

The Micra is a very competent and well engineered product. It has all the right ingredients to make it the next big thing in the hatch segment. To start with, it is Japanese it is spacious, comes loaded with technology & safety features and is a no-nonsense, easy to drive urban commuter. It is on par with its competitors when it comes to performance as well. Being Japanese, we expect it to be hassle-free to run and own and we expect the Micra to be low on maintenance costs. As regards the dealers for the car, Nissan India is already tying up with dealers across the country. The company has opened five new dealerships recently in Ludhiana, Gurgaon, Calicut, Jalandhar and Surat and plans to have more than 30 dealers by end of this fiscal year. Now all that really is left that will decide the fate of the Micra in India is the pricing, which we will publish the moment the car is launched on the 14th of July 2010.

To see the pictures of the top-of-the-line trim level XV. Click here.