Nissan Might Be Killing Two Of Its Cheapest, Most Popular Cars

The death of cheap-ish sedans and small cars continues. Maybe. If speculation from Motor 1 based off a future timeline from Automotive News is to believed, Nissan’s Altima and Versa sedans are gone after 2025.

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 Automotive News has its ears close to the industry — close enough that it has a pretty good idea of what models are coming and what’s going away for future years based off news and internal sources. Its future product timeline for Nissan shows an end for the Altima and Versa in 2025. These two going away could be making way for a new EV sedan that’s supposed to come in 2026, according to Auto News.

Of course Nissan wouldn’t comment on future product news. A spokesperson for the company issued a statement to Motor1, reiterating that the Altima was just updated for 2022 and that the company is looking forward to the future. “As we accelerate towards realizing Nissan’s Ambition 2030 vision we have many exciting plans in development, but we don’t have anything to share at this time.”

2023 Nissan VersaImage: Nissan

The axing of the Versa would, no matter what you think of the car itself, be unfortunate. It would be the death of yet another cheap small car for the market. At one time the Versa was the cheapest new car in America at $9,995. Sure it was a penalty box, but it was cheap. As the years went on, it grew into a bland, nondescript car that people with low credit scores could get into with low down payments. A redesign in 2019 made the car way more appealing than it ever was. Unfortunately, though, it’s a sedan, and Nissan would rather you buy a Kicks crossover instead.

If the guillotine comes for the Altima, that’ll be a head scratcher. The death of the sedan is largely over exaggerated; Ford sold over 110,000 Fusions a year before it went away for instance. And the Altima still sells well, all things considered. In fact, it was Nissan’s second-best selling car in 2022 after the Rouge with 139,955 sold. Nearly 79,000 Altimas have been sold so far this year; thats enough for it to keep its second place sales position. So it’s not as if this thing went from selling over 100,000 units to just 50,000. It’s still selling.

The Versa’s sales are a different story. While sales were up 115 percent in Q3 2023, Nissan has still only moved just 11,014 this year.

Whatever the future holds for these two models, appreciate them… I can’t even bring myself to say appreciate them while you can. Who’s going to appreciate an Altima or Versa? One way or the other, whatever happens, we’ll either be surprised by it or not at all.