Motorshow visitors come in all shapes and sizes with varying reasons for being at the show. This month's
Tokyo Motor Show has it all and a quick scan of Nissan's planned exhibits indicates that most visitors would be catered for on its stand alone.
Taking centre stage will be the Nissan LEAF, an electric car that has been designed from the outset for mass production. Other than the electric powertrain it's a conventional enough five-seat, five-door family hatchback, which apparently has a decent enough range of about 100 miles. It'll be on sale relatively soon too.
Other new production cars include the Nissan Fuga and Roox. The latter is a tall and narrow mono-box typical of Japan's city streets, but the former is quite relevant as it'll be sold here as the Infiniti M saloon and it'll be available in
M35 Hybrid guise.
The
Qazana crossover is apparently due to be on show in its concept form, which we've seen already. Given that production begins next year we'd have expected to see a showroom-ready version soon.
Last, but certainly not least, is the bizarre Land Glider concept pictured above. Nissan's designers reckon the answer to congestion and parking problems is to dramatically reduce the width of cars. Someone obviously then pointed out that the show car might just fall over in the corners so the engineers were drafted in to come up with a cunning leaning mechanism to shift the centre of gravity. Sounds like a motorbike to us...
We'll tell you more as the details come in. The first day of the Tokyo Motor Show in October 21.
Shane O' Donoghue - 7 Oct 2009