Nissan Plans New, Smaller “Love It or Hate It” Sports Car Below Z [2013 Detroit Auto Show]

January 15, 2013 at 5:14 pm by
 Nissan ESFLOW concept from 2011 Geneva auto show

2011 Nissan ESFLOW Concept

Ferocious animals, forces of nature, mythology, and women. These are the building blocks of sports-car analogies. But yeast?

“It’s like Marmite,” Nissan executive vice president Andy Palmer told us today at the Detroit auto show, describing a third sports car for the Nissan brand by comparing the new model to a British food spread created from yeast extract. “You’ll love it or hate it.”



While Palmer wouldn’t divulge much in the way of details, he told us Nissan will be showing a concept for the new model within a year. It won’t be a Subaru BRZ/Scion FR-S fighter, but a youth-oriented design more akin in spirit to the Juke. It would sit beneath the GT-R and the Z in the product lineup, and likely involve some sort of electrified powertrain, as Palmer described the car as “guilt-free.”

This isn’t the first time Nissan has floated the idea of a sports car for the video-game generation. Its Urge concept from the 2006 New York Auto show promised to double as a life-size driving controller, and the more recent 2011 ESFLOW concept packed an electric Leaf powertrain in a sports-car body.

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