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What makes a Renault? If you ask me, I will say funky French styling, quirky ergonomics, weird names and sporty driving appeal. If you ask Carlos Ghosn, he will probably say “Nissan.”
Surely the chairman of the Renault-Nissan Alliance (le cost killer, one of the most influential names in the automotive business, the industry’s great white hope, Japanese manga character), won’t say that, but it’s the truth. Look at the car in the pictures — it may be called the Renault Pulse, but anyone with a remote interest in cars will know it’s a Nissan Micra. So does that make it a Renault?
Certainly not. And this is the outcome of Ghosn’s much-touted frugal engineering concept. Take a Micra, get the Renault Design Centre in Mumbai to change the front end, add new tail-lamps, revise the interior plastic colour a bit, slap on a few of those lozenge-shaped logos, and bingo, you have Renault’s first small car for India. This is the result of a strategy that involves getting relevant cars to the market in the shortest possible time and with the least amount of money. In simpler terms, it’s a short cut.
Okay, now platform sharing is not a new thing. The finest exponent of the art is of course the Volkswagen Group. Just a small example will suffice: Skoda Rapid and VW Vento or even Skoda Fabia and VW Polo. Twins but not virtually identical — there’s been some effort to differentiate between the two for the customer. But with the Pulse and the Micra, this effort is missing. And that’s exactly what my crib is. It’s not that the Alliance is new to the concept of platform sharing — for instance, the Nissan X-Trail and the Renault Koleos have lots of stuff in common, but both vehicles have their own identity. However, with these hatchbacks, there seems to be no effort to differentiate the two. And when the price of the Pulse will be announced at the Auto Expo in January — which will be slightly more than the Micra’s price — you fear that these two partners will end up cannibalising each other’s sales instead of eating into the competition’s market share. Let’s hope the Alliance doesn’t do the same thing with the Renault equivalent of the Nissan Sunny.
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