Nissan christens upcoming B-Segment SUV as Magnite

Nissan recently unveiled its ‘Next’ plan – a global revival of the brand with 12 new models. The Next plan also highlighted the company’s focus toward the AMI (Africa, India and Middle East) market, with eight new models slated for launch in these. For India though, the plan is slightly different and spearheaded by the Magnite. With a growing trend of SUVs globally and in our country, as well as our unique sub-four metre laws, the Magnite has been developed specifically for our country and will be manufactured locally.

We have been seeing teasers of the Magnite for quite a while now, they even bombarded the roads around the Auto Expo with hoarding of it, just so we wouldn’t miss their presence. Now though, the design of the Magnite has been fully revealed, atleast in near-production concept form. It gets a larger grille at the front, with slim headlights and an L-shaped DRL element, all of which give the Magnite a fairly aggressive front-end. On the side, the plastic cladding around the arches, exaggerated haunches and the blacked-out roof make the Magnite look very sleek. The rear-end gets a fairly busy bumper with a faux-diffuser and what also look to be faux exhausts. There is also a contour under the new Nissan logo, breaking up the otherwise rather clean top half. Expect the production-spec Magnite to lose the big rims, some of the chrome and fancy lighting details, but stay much the same in terms of the overall design.

Nissan was very vocal about their focus on AMI, but particularly about India, accepting that they weren’t performing up to the mark and stating that it may just take one good product for that to change. So, they are aiming to make the Magnite a segment leader in terms of the value proposition, offering features like the Around View monitor, an eight-inch infotainment screen and connected car technology, among others. The Magnite will be launched in FY 2020 and will enter a stacked segment, populated by the Ford EcoSport, Hyundai Venue and the Tata Nexon. It will be interesting to see how the Magnite fares against its more established rivals.