Nissan Motor Company has recently announced its plans to relaunch a retro-brand Datsun with a price tag in the range of $3,000 to $5,000.
According to interviews with Nissan’s CEO — Carlos Ghosn — and other company executives, the Datsun reboot is expected to hit select markets (India, Indonesia, and Russia) in 2014 and will be extremely basic; a full complement of airbags and automatic transmissions will be missing from the bare-bones automobiles, the Wall Street Journal reports.
The WSJ also noted that in order to cut costs, Nissan will source parts almost entirely from the country in which the finished product is to be made and sold.
“If you go to the US, it’s not going to end up being $3,000,” Ghosn told the paper in an article published Monday.
Ghosn added the new brand will be one of Nissan’s primary “accelerators of growth,” in the company’s campaign to grab 8 percent of the world market by 2016, up from 6 percent at present.
If Nissan continues forward with its Datsun revival, the automaker will set a new lows for the pricing of an auto in the emerging market.
At the $3,000, the new Datsun vehicle will be nearly a third the price of Nissan’s current most inexpensive car, the $8,000 Tsuru compact sold in Mexico.
Datsun — the first set of wheels for many teens in the 60s and 70s — was discontinued in 1986 despite being the second largest selling foreign brand in the United States just a few years prior.
The WSJ has more on the forthcoming $3,000 Nissan Datsun in the video below:
