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Nissan is hoping to exploit new fleet opportunities thanks to a return to the traditional lower medium sector with its new Pulsar hatchback.
The brand dropped the Almera model in 2007 at the same time as instigating the mainstream crossover segment with the launch of the Qashqai, but UK boss Jim Wright told BusinessCar the company has been missing out on some fleet business as a result.
"Many fleet customers, particularly large companies, said 'your line-up is non-traditional'; the corporate side wanted a C-segment [lower medium] hatchback so here we are," he said. "People have been saying there is a gap in the range - Pulsar will fill it. That means we're able to do more deals with large corporates and therefore sell more Qashqai, Juke and Note models."
According to Wright, most Qashqai customers downsize from the upper medium segment or move from a traditional lower medium hatchback, so the area of the market where supermini drivers upgrade is one Nissan isn't active in. Up to 65% of people upgrading from the Ford Fiesta's supermini class go to a regular lower medium hatchback, with only 17% making the step up as far as a crossover such as the Qashqai.
Government contracts is one place where Nissan sees potential thanks to its widened offering.
"When you're putting in a tender they say it has to be a C-segment hatchback, so we're excluded - even if we offer the Qashqai we're excluded on price because we're 10% more expensive than the Pulsar, which now gives us another entry in terms of price," said Wright. "In our range there's logic with where it sits between the Note and Qashqai. There's logic in what we're missing."
The firm is looking to push its market share up to 6% from 5.2% at the end of 2013, and Wright said Nissan "couldn't do that without a car in this sector". Between the Micra, Note and Juke, which Wright referred to as "lower, mainstream and premium" parts of the supermini segment, he claimed Nissan is taking up to 12% of the sector, and Qashqai is doing 7% of the lower medium segment on its own. "If we can supplement that with reasonable volume of the Pulsar we'll be pushing way above the market rate," he said. "With that C-segment line-up and penetration, it makes the numbers of getting to 6% stack up."
The Pulsar, however, won't rival Nissan's biggest-selling models. While the firm is looking at 50,000 Qashqai models and 35,000 Jukes in a full year, the long-term target is 12,000-15,000 Pulsars, which would also put it behind the Note supermini.
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