Nissan Murano Convertible - A Step Too Far?

Best Car magazine is unashamedly the trashy gossip-laden tabloid of the Japanese automotive media establishment. Every fortnight sees the Best Car editorial team gather together with a crack team of Photoshop operatives to craft their utopian computer-generated vision of what the future has in store for Japan's car industry. The result is often pure fantasy - a bi-monthly rag saturated with scoops of future models which are conspicuously little more than works of fiction, never destined for production. This is not meant to disparage. In an age which is seeing the development of many an interesting vehicle sacrificed in the name of economic streamlining, Best Car's outlandish promises of an abundance of tantilising new metal offer a breath of fresh air.

While other motoring periodicals are currently awash with news of the havoc wreaked on the Japanese car industry by the global economic downturn, the harbinger of doom approach is resolutely not the Best Car way. No stranger to nonconformism, Best Car remains defiant in the face of the so-called carpocalypse, continuing to proffer its full complement of fantastical new model scoops with each successive issue. Although incipient signs were beginning to appear to suggest that Best Car was considering toning the fantasy down a notch in capitulation to the prevailing economic sentiment of gloom - recent issues have shown reasonably staid scoop images of run of the mill fare such as Nissan's new March/Micra - the current issue reverses this trend, once again launching an all out attack on the evil forces of the carpocalypse.
Spearheading this attack is news that Honda's aborted next generation NSX project will be reborn as a high-performance hybrid sportscar boasting 400ps. Bringing up the rear are a number of smaller scoops, from the return of the Honda Beat in 2011, to a convertible version of the Toyota iQ, set to debut in 2010. While these all seem surprisingly credible, what shows that Best Car has once again returned to the realm of the fantastical, and is truly flying in the face of the pernicious effects of the carpocalypse, is news of a two-door convertible version of Nissan's Murano SUV, pencilled in for launch in spring 2010. As carmakers rush to abandon their forays into new niches in the wake of economic meltdown, it seems inconceivable that Nissan would even be considering a flirtation with a niche as specialised and confined as that of the two-door, convertible luxo-SUV. However, according to Best Car, although Nissan may be halting development of a number of other niche products, the continued development of the Murano convertible has allegedly been given the seal of approval by none other than Nissan CEO, Carlos Ghosn. Equipped with an electric soft-top and either a 2.5l 4-cylinder, or 3.5l V6 powerplant, the Murano is expected to cost somewhere in the region of 5 Million Yen, if and when it goes on sale. Looking vaguely reminiscent of a Chrysler PT Cruiser Convertible, I for one will be astounded if this ever sees the light of day.