In another IndianAutosBlog.com special, we bring you spy shots of the Nissan NV200 testing near Bangalore. These images were sent in by IAB lover Shreyas S.Sreedhar, who in his teens knows his cars.
Nissan has so many different variants of the NV200 in Europe and UK. It was recently chosen as New York's 21 generation taxi cab replacing the Crown Victoria. In our eyes, we can broadly classify the NV200 into two categories - family MPV and a cleared-out variant that is panel van for traders and small businesses.
We compared Shreyas's snaps of the test mule to theNV200 variants from the UK market. The silver highlights on the dashboard and the pro-economy manual transmission are the only notable differences. Notice how the gear lever is planted - it is on a part of the dashboard and is so like the Hyundai i10. It serves the purpose in providing cost advantage to the manufacturer and good ergonomics to the driver.
Plastic quality isn't all that great, the dual tone dashboard constructed using hard plastics reminds us of the A-Star. There will be plenty of storage spaces around the cabin. We can also see controls for manual AC and a dual color scheme on the seats.
With a cabin that can seemingly fit an universe of objects and the service of the fuel-efficient 1.5-liter diesel motor, Nissan will hope to capture some of the Innova's market share. Being an internationally acclaimed product we believe the NV200 has a better chance of giving Innova some headaches if they get the pricing right.