Thursday, October 10, 2013

Nissan Juke Nismo RS to Debut at LA Auto Show

Coming in late November through early December is the 2013 LA Auto Show where Nissan will debut at least two new NISMO vehicles.

The only one confirmed at this time is the Juke NISMO RS.  This now makes four distinct models of the Juke that are available.  You have your regular Juke (in all its associated trim levels), the Juke NISMO, the Juke-R and now the Juke NISMO RS.

The standard Juke, Juke NISMO and Juke NISMO RS are those that are or will be found at your local dealership while the Juke-R is the highly limited production, half a million dollar Frankenstein project that sees the transplant of a GT-R driveline into the standard chassis.  The normal Juke comes with 188hp while the NISMO version saw a bump to 197hp along with a host of suspension and body tweaks to make it stand out.

The NISMO RS to be introduced in LA will take its performance to another level beyond that of the "plain"  NISMO but not anywhere near that of the Juke-R.  Though details are scant, an increase in power to significantly beyond 200hp (in theory to match that of the Mazdaspeed 3 which puts out some 263hp) along with an upgraded cooling system, suspension and aero designs are all likely.  In my dreams they would kit it out like a true stage rally car but I'm betting they still focus on the street handling nature of the platform.  At the very least they hopefully offer a manual transmission to be paired with the AWD version as in the NISMO (non-RS) model the manual transmission is only available with the FWD model leaving anyone wanting AWD relegated to letting a computer row the gates.

Unconfirmed by Nissan is what the second NISMO model will be at the LA Auto Show.  Some say a NISMO GT-R...I say it is a Nissan Versa hatchback with the NISMO label since they already offer a Nissan Pulsar (Versa here in the States) SSS elsewhere in the world and doing some minor tweaks to that version would easily give NISMO another model to its "performance" lineup.  This version would contain the same 1.6L turbo engine seen in the Juke, leading to all sorts of high hp possibilities for the small hatchback.

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