I had a quiet heart-to-heart with Nissan's NP200 half-ton bakkie before the two of us embarked on the first journey of a week-long road test.
I told it that I would forgive it for putting the 37-year-old 1400 legend into retirement. I told it I would turn a blind eye to its Romanian background. I told it that I would wipe my somewhat tainted slate clean after a rather disappointing media launch which saw Dacia-imprinted trim panels gathering in the footwells.
I was perfectly willing to offer any credit if and where it was due, but it would have to earn it the old-fashioned way; I wasn't willing to pass it on its Japanese badges alone.
This Nissan, along with its French cousins the Sandero and Logan which all share the same B-segment platform as a result of Dacia/Nissan/Renault interbreeding, and I have started on bad terms at their local introduction.
Yes, I fully understand that the competition-undercutting prices offer a tasty drawcard especially in our market, but I personally feel that slack build quality issues and attention to detail that can best be described as lazy, have been just plain unacceptable.
So the NP200 and I set off to see if we could make amends. This particular test unit is the recently upgraded SE version complete with an extra eight valves inside its 1.6-litre engine upping output to 77kW and 148Nm over its 64kW and 128Nm eight-valve sibling. Power is reasonable especially if all you're toting is scuba gear or the odd groceries, but load up to its maximum 800kg capacity and I suspect things will be slow going.
It's not the smoothest quad-valve engine I can think of either; anything over 4500rpm feels like you've converted the engine bay into a mechanical torture chamber. Gearshifts are sloppy and on several occasions a simple second-to-third change turned into a serious porridge-stirring session. A small amount of engineering to the linkage such as some strategically placed counterweights would improve quality perception from the driver's seat tenfold.
This SE model also gets some mild exterior jewellery but I can't help but think of Evita Bezuidenhout at every glance. Not that I don't welcome the colour-coded bumpers, beefy black wheel-arch extensions and shimmering fog lights. It's just that under all the bling there are still inexcusable panel gap variations that on our car's left door line started like a hairline crack at the bottom and ended like the Grand Canyojn at the top.
I reckon an extra half-hour at that part of the assembly line in Pretoria would increase quality perception exponentially.
That said, this bakkie pulls off the Romanian-based body better than its related cars. The Sandero and Logan seem a little... no, a lot, dated when parked beside their curvaceous market rivals but when applied to a bakkie the Eastern-bloc design comes across more "chiselled" than "old".
SOFT LANDINGS
Also, because it's based on the same front-wheel drive chassis as the Renault Sandero and Logan, even the Nissan Micra, its ride is very cushy when compared to its leaf-sprung predecessor the 1400. I remember commenting on the Renault cousins' ride qualities after their respective road tests and luckily the NP200 follows suit.
Attacking speed bumps and surface-protruding roundabouts results in soft landings every time and in the bakkie's case a smallish load even helps to soak up rough tarmac.
And, as I've already mentioned, the NP200's pricing is quite appetising so it scores there, too. It undercuts its class-leading rivals by a healthy margin across the various model ranges. That's certainly a determining factor when it comes to runabout workhorses... I'm just not so sure about blinged up Bezuidenhout versions.
So, did it make amends? Let's just say that no trim panels fell off this time. - INL Motoring