Nissan Hopeful Price, Safety Good for Kicks

SAN DIEGO – Low starting prices and standard safety equipment should help Nissan’s new Kicks small CUV against the competition, brand officials say.

“What separates the Kicks is not only the price...but also the attainable technology,” Rob Warren, director for Nissan North America’s Chief Marketing Office, tells media here last week during an ʼ18 Kicks preview.

The Kicks is on sale now in the U.S., starting at $17,990 not including a $975 destination and handling charge.

That puts it below most competitors in the segment, including two of those Nissan considers its main rivals, the new Hyundai Kona and Ford EcoSport ($19,500 and $19,995, respectively), as well as Toyota’s C-HR ($20,495), Honda’s HR-V ($19,670), Subaru’s Crosstrek ($21,795) and the Jeep Compass, the best-selling model in Wards Intelligence’s Small CUV group this year with 55,041 sales through April and starting at $21,095.

However, the Kicks doesn’t undercut the Kia Soul, another model Nissan sees as a key competitor and which begins at $16,200 for a manual model and $17,800 if equipped with an automatic transmission.

On safety, Warren says Nissan research shows buyers in the group want most of the same features as are available on other, costlier CUVs.

For that reason, Nissan made automatic emergency braking standard on the base-grade Kicks S, and blindspot warning and rear-cross-traffic alert are standard on the second grade up, the SV model which begins at $19,690. The SV also has standard Android Auto and Apple CarPlay.

The top trim level, the SR, is $20,290 and adds a standard 360-degree-view monitor.

Most players in the segment have such safety features in option packages barring the C-HR, which has some of the technologies in Toyota’s Safety Sense standard suite of advanced safety systems.

“To get (automatic emergency braking) on the (Kona) you’d have to spend nearly $10,000 more...and (the EcoSport) doesn’t have automatic emergency braking,” Warren says of two newer players in the segment.

Twenty automakers, Ford, Hyundai and Nissan included, have vowed to make AEB (sometimes called forward-collision avoidance) available on all new vehicles by Sept. 1, 2022, per a U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Admin. initiative.

Meanwhile, Nissan’s ProPilot technology, which integrates adaptive cruise control and lane-keep assist, is not on the Kicks because Nissan wants to reserve it for higher-volume models.

“Where we can have the biggest initial impact is in on (our) best-selling vehicle on the road,” Michael Terrell, an associate in the Chief Marketing Office, tells WardsAuto of ProPilot launching on Nissan’s No.1-seller, its Rogue midsize CUV.

Meanwhile, Terrell says Nissan isn’t sweating the Kicks’ lack of all-wheel drive, or possible tariffs that would make the Aguascalientes, Mexico-built vehicle more expensive.

The Kicks likely will do best in the so-called ‘smile’ states, those in the South and up the coasts, so lack of AWD shouldn’t hurt sales much, Terrell says, noting plenty of demand remains for front-wheel-drive CUVs in the Midwest and Northeast.

“At one point (Kia) was selling 140,000 units a year (of the AWD-less Soul),” he notes.

Nissan also has AWD available on its other small CUV, the Rogue Sport.

On President Donald Trump’s proposed tariffs of 25% on vehicles assembled in Mexico imported to the U.S., and their potential impact on the Kicks, Terrell says, “that’s not something I’m going to speculate on.”

Nissan will not divulge its sales goal for the new CUV in the U.S., but believes it should do better than the discontinued low-volume Juke, which helped establish the small CUV group in the States when it was launched in 2010 and cost roughly $20,000 to $30,000 in its final model year of ’17.

“Just based on the virtue of the attributes of the vehicle and how we have it priced, we think it’ll have a much broader appeal than the Juke,” Terrell says of the Kicks.

Nissan’s record Juke volume was 38,184 units in 2014, Wards Intelligence data shows.