Roox and Roox Highway Star under the knife
AutoWeek is of course again packed with relevant car news today, but where is that new or renewed car that is not coming to the Netherlands? Don’t panic, we have one for you again today. This is the renewed Nissan Roox!
At AutoWeek we like to peek across the border to see what beautiful things are happening there in the car field. We travel to Japan, where Nissan has given the Roox a facelift. Anyone who expects a lot from this would do better to drop out now. The facelift that Nissan is implementing on the Roox is just as thin as the model is short.
In a nutshell: what is a Nissan Roox? The Nissan Roox is one of the purebred kei cars that Nissan offers in Japan. That means that it can be just under 3.4 meters long and 1.48 meters wide and has a maximum 660 cc and 64 hp strong machine in the front. The Nissan Roox meets those requirements, just like kei-boertjes Dayz and its electric Sakura equivalent. However, the Roox is the practical alternative to the Dayz. They are equal in length and width, but the Roox towers above the 1.66 meter high Dayz with its height of about 1.8 metres. The Roox is a so-called tallboy, a kei-car that gets its extra convenience mainly from extra height and one or more sliding doors. The Roox therefore has two sliding doors, while the Dayz has to make do with conventional doors.
The Nissan Roox Highway Star before the facelift.
Like many other kei cars, the Nissan Roox is available in two characters. There is a regular variant and a more extravagantly dressed variant that, in the case of the small Nissan, gets the Highway Star addition to its model name. Nissan skillfully strips the well-known V-motion grille from the front of the Roox duo and adds chrome accents to the grille that are only slightly reminiscent of the lost design element that dominated the front of almost all Nissans of recent years. In addition, the headlights are subtly renewed and the regular Roox gets a new front bumper, complete with new vertical slots. Nissan also brings new wheels to the little ones. The Nissan Roox is also Nissan’s version of the Mitsubishi eK X Space, just as the Dayz is the Nissan variant of the Mitsubishi Delica Mini.
Is this of any use to the Dutch market? Well, no, but it does illustrate nicely how such small cars are constantly being updated in Japan, while the city car in Europe seems to be disappearing at a rapid pace.
.
– Thanks for information from Autoweek.nl