2012 Nissan Versa Seda, Nissan Leaf NISMO RC Concept Make World Debuts at New York International Auto Show

NEW YORK (April 20, 2011) - An all-new Nissan Versa Sedan designed to bring "innovation within reach" to the entry-level compact segment. A purpose-built race car version of the world's first mass-market all-electric vehicle, the Nissan LEAF. These two vehicles made their world debuts during a media conference at the New York International Auto Show. Both vehicles will be on display throughout the run of the show, April 22nd through May 1st, at New York City's Jacob Javits Convention Center.

The 2012 Nissan Versa Sedan, which goes on sale at Nissan dealers nation wide this summer with a starting Manufacturer's Suggested Retail Price (M.S.R.P.) of $10,990, features a sophisticated exterior design, well-appointed interior and exceptional room for five adults - including more legroom than many mid-size sedans.

"For many companies, innovation typically starts at the high-end and eventually works its way down the model line. In developing the new entry-level Versa Sedan, we challenged ourselves to find innovative ways to deliver a no-compromise entry-level car," said Carlos Tavares, chairman, Nissan Americas. "We achieved this by enhancing the fuel economy, reducing the emissions, and embracing modern design while continuing to offer a spacious and comfortable interior. All at a very affordable price."

The new Versa Sedan offers a second-generation 1.6-liter 4-cylinder engine that includes a range of cutting-edge technologies such as a dual injector system and twin Continuously Variable Timing Control (CVTC) system - making it one of the most advanced powerplants in its class. Fuel economy is estimated at 30 mpg City, 37 mpg Highway and 33 mpg Combined (CVT transmission), an improvement of five mpg versus the 2011 Versa Sedan. The 2012 Nissan Versa Sedan will be available in three models - S, SV and SL.

Sharing the stage with the new Versa Sedan, the dramatic Nissan LEAF NISMO RC (for Racing Competition) utilizes a production Nissan LEAF powertrain wrapped in a unique 2-door carbon fiber body with removable front and rear sections and a large adjustable rear wing.

Like the production Nissan LEAF, the NISMO RC is powered by a lithium-ion battery composed of 48 compact modules and a high-response 80kW AC synchronous motor that generates 107 horsepower and 207 lb-ft of torque. Unlike other competition vehicles, the NISMO RC has no tailpipe. no emission of CO2 or other greenhouse gases while being driven, and no exhaust sound. It is projected to have a running time of around 20 minutes under racing conditions.

"We believe EVs can be more than commuter cars. The Nissan LEAF NISMO RC is an example of that thinking. This vehicle is a rolling laboratory for the accelerated development of EV performance and aerodynamic systems, as well as a platform for the development of a new 'green' motorsports series," added Tavares.

About Nissan North America

In North America, Nissan's operations include automotive styling, design, engineering, consumer and corporate financing, sales and marketing, distribution and manufacturing. Nissan is dedicated to improving the environment under the Nissan Green Program 2010 and has been recognized as a 2010 and 2011 ENERGY STAR Partner of the Year by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. More information about Nissan in North America and the complete line of Nissan and Infiniti vehicles can be found online at www.NissanUSA.com and www.Infiniti.com.

About Nissan

Nissan Motor Co., Ltd., Japan's second largest Japanese automotive company by volume, is headquartered in Yokohama, Japan and is an integral pillar of the Renault-Nissan Alliance. Operating with more than 150,000 employees globally, Nissan provided customers with more than 4 million vehicles in 2010.

With a strong commitment to developing exciting and innovative products for all, Nissan delivers a comprehensive range of fuel-efficient and low-emissions vehicles under the Nissan and Infiniti brands. A pioneer in zero emission mobility, Nissan made market history with the introduction of the Nissan LEAF, the first affordable, mass-market, pure-electric vehicle and winner of numerous international accolades including the prestigious 2011 European Car of the Year award.

For more information on our products, services and commitment to Sustainable Mobility, visit our website at http://www.nissan-global.com/EN/.

Driven to Distraction

Computer-based touch screen controls are becoming ubiquitous in cars. They are used to operate everything from audio to air conditioning. But are they more of a nuisance than they're worth?

The MyFord Touch control and display system includes LCD screens that flank the speedometer and a screen in the center stack.

We live in a touch-screen world. Just ask the designers of the iPhone, iPad or any Android device, and they'll tell you there is no better way of putting a near-infinite amount of information and control within a defined space than on a screen that you can interact with directly. Automakers have been integrating touch-screen interfaces into dashboards for several years now, digitizing the controls for everything from navigation to climate-control systems onto large console-mounted screens with an ever-increasing architecture of menus and submenus that now rival the complexity of desktop PCs.

Take the new $58,000 Hyundai Equus, for instance. It not only has an 8-inch screen in the console for everything from navigation to climate control to camera-based parking guidance, the car also comes with its owner's manual installed as an application on an included iPad.

What's driving the need for in-car screens? "Computerization and wireless technology have greatly increased the range of entertainment options," says John D. Lee, a human-factors expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. New cars have satellite radio and Bluetooth links to cell phones, they can play MP3s and read text messages, and many of their computer-controlled systems can be customized by the user. "Screen-based systems make it possible to dramatically increase the number of functions and features available to the driver," Lee says. "Presented as individual knobs and buttons, they would likely exceed the space within arm's length of the driver."

Sounds ideal, right? Not so much.

It's no coincidence that the high-tech feature creep that has necessitated the in-car LCD screen has evolved concurrently with a new concern about the dangers of distracted driving. So far, most distraction-related accidents have resulted from drivers taking their eyes off the road to dial or answer cell-phones, or from the relatively new, boneheaded phenomenon of texting while driving. The statistics are chilling: The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reports that 5,474 people were killed and an estimated 448,000 were injured in distracted-driving accidents in 2009. According to the Insurance for Highway Safety, drivers who use handheld devices are four times as likely to get into serious crashes.

Part of the rationale for integrating a wide range of entertainment and telecommunications devices into a vehicle's controls is to deal with the fact that, like it or not, drivers are bringing phones and iPods and various texting devices into their cars. It would seem better for them to hunt for a song or a phone number on a custom-designed 8-inch console screen than to fumble around for those things on the tiny screen of a portable device. Yet as the complexity of a car's operating system has grown, it seems that the auto industry may be learning all the wrong design lessions from gadgets that they are trying so hard to accommodate.

The Problem

Recently, Consumer Reports slammed the MyFord Touch system, which is at the forefront of a new generation of advanced automotive computer interfaces. Ford had previously gained accolades from auto journalists and customers alike for its Sync system, a voice-recognition technology launched in 2007 that allows drivers to control many of a car's functions with voice commands. Voice recogntion has long been considered a holy grail for automotive interfaces, since it theoretically allows drivers to control complex systems without taking their eyes off the road.

Synch resulted from a partership between Ford and Microsoft (MSN Auto's parent company), and its voice recognition was good enough to call up names from the driver's cell-phone contact list, and even to find individual songs and artists by name on an iPod. The new MyFord Touch system - also known as MyLincoln Touch in the new Lincoln MKX - expands on the voice control with one 8-inch touch-screen and capacitive slide controls built into the center console, plus two 4.2-inch screens integrated into the instrument cluster and a series of steering-wheel-mounted multidirectional control pads.

Ford says the system "helps you keep your eyes on the road," but Consumer Reports' senior automotive engineer Thomas Mutchler thought otherwise, calling the system so complicated that it could become a distraction while driving. "The basic idea's OK," Mutchler says. "There's nothing wrong with having multiple ways of making an input. If you have four ways of adjusting climate control, that's fine, but at least one of them should be a good one. The touch-screen and the buttons are small, and it's hard to find the one you want to push."

He then fired off a litany of ergonomic crimes: "The touch-sensitive capacitive switches are finicky and don't work well when it's cold. The steering-wheel comands are menu-driven, so you have to go through a couple of steps to do something that could have been done with the turn of a knob. The voice commands work sometimes and they don't work sometimes, and you feel kind of stupid talking to the car when there's someone else in the car with you."

It's a pretty strong indictment: The system that was supposed to be designed to help you manage complexity so that you don't get distracted ends up being so complex that it becomes the distraction. As you might expect, Ford sees things differently. A spokesman says the system provides a "smarter, safer, simpler way to connect drivers with many in-car technologies and their digital lives." He said that customer feedback on the system has been positive, but that Ford takes feedback from both customers and Consumer Reports seriously when it comes to upgrading and improving the system. Indeed, as software-based operating systems, Sync and MyFord Touch can be updated relatively easily, and some upgrades to the system have already been made.

The 2011 Audi A8's MMI system features a new touch-pad. It's designed for easy interaction, so the driver doesn't have to take his or her eyes off the road for long.

It's Not Just Sync

Ford is hardly the only manufacturer that has had to defend itself against criticism over distracted driving. Just last year, Audi engineers were surprised and shocked after The New York Times ran a picture of the manufacturer's MMI Touch system, which had just been unveiled at the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show, under the headline "Driven to Distraction." One Audi engineer said that the system had been designed specifically to mitigate the distracting influence of smart phones, MP3 players and other devices, and that any suggestion that a motorist would stop using these devices if cars stopped integrating their functionality was naive.

Whether it is a good idea in the first place to build "infotainment" systems into vehicles will probably remain an open debate for some time, yet the "complexity and confusion" issue is surely made worse by the fact that every manufacturer has its own take on how the technology should be implemented, guaranteeing almost zero standardization.

Audi's MMI system in the A8 has a touch pad that can be reconfigured digitally and that can interpret finger gestures. Mercedes-Benz's Comand system has a dialing puck and an optional dual-view screen that lets passengers and drivers see different things. Lexus has a center-console-mounted Remote Touch mouse with force feedback to enter commands on the screen. And these interfaces are by no means consistent with a brand; some cars have basic touch-screens, others have pucks, dials or multidirectional buttons. Almost all manufacturers have some sort of voice control, but commands are so varied that drivers can end up calling out a thesaurus-worth of synonyms - "Heat!" "Temperature up!" "Warm!" "I'm freakin' cold, turn on the heater!" - just to get anything done.

It Isn't Going Away

Regulators and safety advocates would certainly like to see most of this technology removed from the driving experience. But most automotive experts agree that screen and voice-control systems are here to stay. There are guidelines for good interactive system design; the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers published a 90-page document outlining the best practices for the industry in 2006. It's long-winded and a bit dated, but Lee of the University of Wisconsin-Madison summarizes the basic wisdom of the document in a few points:

• Complex displays that require the driver to search for information using glances longer than two seconds should be avoided.


• The interaction should not "time out" or force the driver to attend continually to the task. The driver should be able to interrupt the task easily and return attention to the road.


• Visual information should be placed near the driver's line of sight.


• The display should be easily readable with text and icons that can be seen at a glance.

Sounds simple, right? But the guidelines are voluntary. Even NHTSA, which is working on its own guidelines, isn't planning on forcing automakers to build their systems to any particular standard.

In the meantime, it seems that confusing systems are the inevitable growing pains of an industry stumbling to find its footing in the fast-moving world of information technology. Despite his concerns about Consumer Reports' criticisms of MyFord Touch, Mutchler sees plenty of room for hope about touch-screens.

"Ford's problem isn't one of ambition, it's one of execution," he says, pointing out that the Toyota Highlander and Chrysler's new UConnect system use large touch-screens with simple menu structures. "Everyone's going to go to this sort of system eventually. Research has shown that touch-screens are more intuitive to use. The next step is the one that quite a few researchers are worried about. What's the impact of a constant flow of Facebook updates or text messages being read to you constantly and you wanting to respond to them constantly? I don't think there's a great answer yet on how you can respond to that cognitive load and still drive a car."

Sam Foley is a Connecticut-based automotive journalist who has written for GQ, Forbes, USA Today, the New York Post and various other publications.

Tell us what you think of the digitizing of cars, helpful or distracting?

First Test: 2011 Nissan 370Z Touring

A Dollar-Per-Grin Win

By Nate Martinez

At Nearly $42,000, a fully loaded 2011 Nissan 370Z Touring isn't cheap-in fact, the car is pricey enough to merit a mild case of sticker shock. But upon closer inspection of its expansive spec sheet, followed by a multi-day test drive, the shock fades while the athletic coupe's intrinsic value grows.

Consider the 370Z's impressive attributes. There are the 14-inch front, 13.8-inch rear Akebono brakes that haul the 3362-pound Z to a stop from 60 mph in only 102 feet (a BMW M3 Coupe with Competition Package does it in 110 feet, a GT-R in 101 feet). These massive four-piston front, two-piston rear binders clamp hard on Nismo's optional $580 R-Tune performance brake pads designed to withstand temperatures of up to 700 degrees Fahrenheit. This is the quickest-stopping Z we've ever driven. And we've driven many, many Zs over the years.

There are the featherweight 19-inch aluminum wheels forged by Japan's renowned Rays Engineering, a supplier of the AT&T Williams Formula 1 team. Even now, only a handful of six-figure supercars roll on such fancy footwear. The rims, along with adhesive Bridgestone Potenza RE050A rubber, a taut suspension setup, and a vicious limited slip differential (all part of the Sport Package), help the 370Z Touring attain a 1.01 g average on the skidpad. That's slightly stickier than a mid-engine, no-option $60,000 Porsche Boxster S at 1.0 g, mind you.

Straight line acceleration adds to its value. The 3.7-liter V-6's 332 horses and 270 pound-feet of torque send the Z to 60 mph in 4.9 seconds, while a quarter-mile passes in 13.4 seconds at 105.2 mph. A rocket it isn't, yet for the segment it occupies, the stats aren't disappointing.

Although you'll have to cough up the Sport Packages $3,030 entry fee to attain such laudable performance, every dollar is money well spent. The option group includes "zero-lift" front and rear spoilers that cut the Z's drag coefficient to a slim 0.29 Cd from the standard car's 0.30 Cd, and though you'll never feel the 0.01 difference in Cd, you will have gained some pub fodder.

The Navigation Package with nearly every facet of multimedia is also worthy of its $2,150 price. The 7-inch VGA monitor is a capable navigation screen and serves as a DVD movie screen when the car is parked (but really who watches DVDs in a parking lot?). A Bose-supplied stereo comes with an iPod input, 9.3-gigabyte hard drive, and streaming Bluetooth capability. Of course, you can connect your mobile phone via Bluetooth, too, though the sound quality and connection strength was patchy.

One of the best new-for-2011 amenities is the rearview camera, which eases any skittishness when reversing. It is included in the Navigation Package, but if you don't opt for the group, you can still get a standalone $750 in-mirror monitor.

The 2011 model year also brings the 370Z Roadster's synthetic suede door and seat inserts to the coupe. The soft, cozy material gives the comfortable, attractive cabin a higher-quality feeling. Leather-wrapped electronically adjustable seats remain standard in the top-level Touring, and support your bum and back with cushioning.

After driving the 2009 370Z three years ago, editor-at-large Ron Kiino had this to say about the then-new car's handling: "The most alluring aspect of the new Z is the sense it imparts: It feels sharp, direct, and balanced, a well-honed santoku knife to the 350Z's blunter and bulkier cleaver."

Kiino's observations still hold true for the 2011. The Z sticks hard and goes fast, and with the center console knee pads and supportive seats, you're always set in the proper position to command its athletic moves. The process usually goes like this: Following an electronically orchestrated downshift or two will help from the controversial SynchroRev Match (the technology's fun factor wilts the longer it's used), the car's inner santoku knife takes over, allowing you to play IronChef with delicious pieces of hot pavement. Dab the Akebonos, mash the floor-mounted accelerator, and prepare for a stupid grin to be plastered on your face.

Santoku sheathed, the Z rides firm, as expected, yet it is not overly jarring. The main source of in-cabin din are the massive 245/40R-19 front, 275/35R-19 rear Bridgestones. Compared to our long-term 370Z Roadster, the coupe serves as the ideal long-distance tourer by virtues of side visibility, overall civility, and cabin quietness.

Getting what you pay for isn't a problem in the 370Z Touring. After three years, we continue to admire its comfort level, style, and, of course, performance. In an automotive world filled with expensive sports cars touting questionable bang-for-your buck returns, the Z carries on as one of the best values around, especially in the dollar-per-grin category.

2011 Nissan 370Z Touring

Base Price: $36,070

Price as Tested: $41,945

Vehicle Layout: Front Engine, RWD, 2-pass, 2-door coupe

Engine: 3.7L/332-hp/270-lb-ft DOHC 24-valve V-6

Transmission: 6-speed manual

Curb Weight: (F/R Dist) 3362 lb (54/46%)

Wheelbase: 100.4 in

Length x Width x Height: 167.2 x 72.6 x 51.8 in

0-60 MPH: 4.9 sec

Quarter Mile: 13.4 sec @ 105.2 mph

Braking, 60-0 mph: 102 ft

Lateral Acceleration: 1.01 g (avg)

Mt Figure Eight: 24.7 sec @ 0.76 g (avg)

EPA city/hwy fuel econ: 18/26 mpg

Energy Consumption, City/Hwy: 187/130 kW-hrs/100 miles

C02 Emissions: 0.93 lb/mile