An irrelevant look at a certain car.
If someone said “Nissan Micra” to you, you’d visualise a queue of traffic. At the front would be a little Micra either being driven by a learner or pensioner. In this third guise, Nissan stuck to its guns and refused to invest in dynamics.
Instead it continued to make the Micra easy to drive. It also made it easy to repair with big plastic bumpers that helped disguise crash repair bodging. Big plastic bumpers covering the majority of the front, made repairs to a smacked in the face Micra easy to hide. And a good job too. Judging by the number of folded in bumpers, parking accidents were quite rife. And why? Because the Micra had grown in size. In doing so, easy to judge extremities of the little hatchback had become lost on new owners of Blobby.
This was a bad period for Nissan and even worse for the Micra. Famous Nissan quality was lost. I mean, the Micra was never a quality product in the touchy feely kind of way. You’d never shut the door with your eyes shut and think “sounds like a Golf”.
Given time, that absurd notion of the idea that this was a Nissan quality product would completely evaporate when the central locking units became vocal. VW’s would have just stopped working. Nissan’s just shouted about it in an audible growl of plastic and electrics.
Instead it was all cheap to feel, cheaper to throw away and cheaper not to repair the thing but throw it out and buy another. Should you be so hell bent on driving misery that is.
In the driving of the Micra, I’m trying to think of a descriptive word to save on word count. Foul is pretty good but then so too is mind numbingly dull. It was a car that was wasted on good tyres. Forget the standard fit Continentals, fit well worn cord-showing slicks. Even remoulds were over specified for this level of dire driving! The vague steering could make even the stickiest F1 racing slicks feel lifeless. Imagine a date with a cast member of Love Island that involved trying to make conversation that wasn’t about biceps or fake tans.
Inside it was just as bad. The light Nissan standard grey plastics made way for European blacks. Even the white heater control buttons couldn’t lift the spirits of the coffin dodger express. Sorry, cabin. I’ve never seen a dead person drive a Micra yet, even though some have looked pretty close to it. You see, unlike Micra K10 and K11, this new model was avoided by the young.
You’d never look at a Micra and think what a fun funky car it was. Even the CC with its metal folding top couldn’t lift you desire like a Ford StreetKa did. You just wouldn’t look back at it, the K12 is that ugly.