For over a year now, Nissan officials have been saying in interviews that the Japanese brand is ready to return to the popular European C-segment with a brand-new hatchback model “exclusively designed for Europe”, which will go head on with the king of sales in the category, the VW Golf, now in its seventh iteration.
Today, our spies emailed us these images of what they believe to be the new compact hatchback Nissan has been talking about all these months. Now, while the lightly camouflaged prototypes looks to be the right size for a compact hatchback, it isn’t exactly new nor a European-exclusive design, as the brand’s head honchos have claimed.
Behind the sheltered grille is the Nissan global compact model we’ve come to know under many names, including the Tiida and Pulsar (see the gallery below), while North American will be familiar with the sedan version of the car, that is none other than the Sentra (called Pulsar in Australia and Sylphy in other markets).
So, what gives? Well, the way we see it, there are two plausible explanations, the first being that Nissan will simply re-tune and perhaps makes some minor changes to the styling and interior quality of the Tiida/Pulsar hatch for Europe, or (less likely in our opinion) this is a test mule with the production version to look entirely different.
We’ll just have to wait and see which one it is – it won’t be long, though, as Nissan has said it will debut the car next year, possibly at the Geneva Motor Show in March 2014, where it will also announce its name.
Photo Credits: CarPix for CarScoopS
PHOTO GALLERY
2013 NISSAN PULSAR & TIIDA HATCH 
