Qashqai and Juke won’t jump in price when they go electric-only later this decade
Nissan is aiming for the next-generation, electric-only Juke and Qashqai – which will be designed, engineered and built in Britain – to cost the same as the current combustion-engined models.
The successors to the nation’s best-selling car of 2022 and its smaller sibling will arrive in the second half of the decade and will swap their petrol and hybrid powertrains for battery-electric ones.
Despite the generally higher cost of EVs, Nissan boss Makoto Uchida said selling the pair at a price equal to today’s ICE cars was “what we’re aiming for and what our ambition is”.
The Qashqai currently starts at just under £30,000 and the Juke from around £21,000.
Uchida admitted that achieving such price parity was a challenge, adding: “At one side we talk about scale and how to support that, and on the other side we need supply chains to be established.
“We’re at the stage of considering how we’re going to make EVs balanced [on price] with ICE [cars]. It’s a challenging discussion, because the regulations in each country aren’t moving at the same pace.”
The Qashqai and Juke will continue to be built in Sunderland as they go electric, sharing that factory with the successor to the Leaf EV, which will morph from a hatchback into a crossover.
Nissan is investing at least £1.19 billion in its UK operations as part of its commitment to build the new Qashqai and Juke – a figure that includes design work at Nissan’s London studio, development and prototyping at its Cranfield technical centre and retooling and preparing Sunderland for the new platform and bodies.
Both cars will maintain their ‘edgy’ styling but will be fresh designs, as previewed by two concepts shown at the recent Tokyo motor show: the Hyper Urban and Hyper Punk.
While the Hyper Urban in particular features sharp, angular styling, David Moss, Nissan’s European R&D chief, told Autocar that the company has “paid a lot more attention to aerodynamics” than before in a bid to maximise efficiency and consequently range.
The future Qashqai, Juke and Leaf EVs will all sit on the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi Alliance’s CMF-EV platform, which was designed for C- and D-segment EVs. This suggests the Juke could grow slightly.
Nissan is also developing an electric successor to the Micra supermini, which will
