  2015 Nissan Micra SR Road Trip. Click image to enlarge |
Review and photos by Brendan McAleer
As was remarked upon in our round-up of Canadian automobiles, we Canucks like our landscapes wide and our cars wee. While the US gobbles up heaping mounds of Toyota Camrys, we nibble on portion-controlled Honda Civics, a predilection for cheap and cheerful that extends right back to the beginning. You get the sense that early Canadians tried to order their horses without the optional mane extensions and with smaller-displacement feed bags.
From time to time, manufacturers recognize that our tastes extend beyond either dunking things in Maple syrup or coating them in cheese curds n’ gravy, and they build a small car just for Canadians. Generally, even when they aren’t very good long-term (hi there, Hyundai Pony) we can’t get enough.
These days, the Nissan Micra is the least expensive new car in Canada. A rebadged version of the March subcompact, it replaces the outgoing Versa Sedan with a dollop of useful hatchback style, and for less money too. It’s all the car you really need – or is it? Sure it might be decent at the stop-and-go stuff, but to find out whether the Micra could go the distance, I decided to drive it from Calgary to Vancouver, a thousand kilometres across the spine of the Rocky Mountains, taking along along my wife and my daughter, who is just under two.
Now, I decide to do lots of idiotic things like this, but generally my slightly more sensible wife usually steps in and says something like, “Don’t be a something-something idiot,” where the phrasing of something-something is on a sliding-scale matched to the silliness of the idea in question. In this particular case she wasn’t paying attention to the whole “Micra” part of the equation (or perhaps I mumbled), and thus we found ourselves trying to cram a car seat, folding cot, and all the accoutrements required for a road trip with a toddler into a tiny Japanese subcompact that costs the automotive equivalent of ninety-nine cents.
  2015 Nissan Micra SR Road Trip. Click image to enlarge |
Well, not this one, actually. This is the super-deluxe version of the value-meal Nissan, the one with curly fries and pepper jack cheese. While the base car comes with a stick shift and no air-con, the SR ups the ante with 16-inch alloy wheels, cruise control, a USB iPod connector, and a back-up camera. Considering that this thing’s the size of a Cozy Coupe, the back-up camera seems a bit surplus to requirements, and the whole shebang’s a bit too spendy – I’d prefer a more lightly optioned ride.
Whenever you look at a Nissan Micra, the theme song from MadTV’s Lowered Expectations dating-site spoof should play in your head. Sure, the 1.6L four-banger’s only got 109 hp, but $9,998! Sure, you don’t have power windows, but $9,998! Sure, the automatic transmission option only has four gears, but that’s only a thousand bucks more! Looowered expectatioooons…
Point is, for that cheap, I’m impressed you get doors. Flipping through the Micra’s sub-site does give the impression the copywriters didn’t have much to work with though. “The 2015 Nissan Micra wears the PUREDRIVE® badge, just one aspect of Nissan’s commitment to developing more environmentally friendly and fuel efficient transportation for all of us.” Wow! Wait, what does that badge do exactly? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?
  2015 Nissan Micra SR Road Trip. Click image to enlarge |
And then there’s: “Variable Intermittent Windshield Wipers. Adjusting the Nissan Micra’s wiper speed and frequency depending on the amount of precipitation outside has never been easier.” Well, finally. I can’t wait to get rid of this squeegee attached to a coathanger.
I kid – I kid because the Micra actually impressed the hell out of me by swallowing all our junk without a hiccup. The bulky Bjorn travel cot fit in the trunk standing straight up, along with three backpacks and a folding stroller. The car seat wedged in behind the passenger’s seat, leaving my admittedly not-very-tall wife with just enough space, and there was still room for a suitcase, a couple of grocery bags worth of road supplies, coats, computers, and several bottles of water.
If we’d had to do it, there was even enough room for a third adult passenger, and when we all piled in, the Micra’s comically high roofline gave an impression of space, even if driver and passenger were sitting close enough to be technically in a sort of automotive loveseat.
  2015 Nissan Micra SR Road Trip. Click image to enlarge |
We waved to the friends we’d been staying with, backed out of the driveway, hooked up a podcast on the AUX jack, and hit the road, stopping to fill up on the edge of town with that sweet, sweet, cheap Alberta gasoline. This resulted in facing down a very short on-ramp.
Uh-oh.
109 hp is perfectly fine for a motorcycle, or a snowmobile, or a Braun hand-blender. In a loaded-up hatchback with a four-speed automatic, there are occasions where a few more horsepower wouldn’t go amiss. Fully committed, with my foot welded to the floorboards and a semi-trailer that had looked several kilometres away looming in the rear-view is one of those occasions. Come on, little guy!
First gear is nippy, second gear is a bit sluggish to climb out of the 60 km/h region, but once the Micra was up and moving at highway speeds, we soon joined the rest of the high-speed flatlanders at a respectable velocity. The sun shone, but the air-conditioning pumped out deliciously cool air, and the little Nissan beetled along just as if it was a real car. Which, come to think of it, it actually is.
    2015 Nissan Micra SR Road Trip. Click image to enlarge |
The outskirts of Calgary resemble nothing so much as the Microsoft Windows wallpaper, an unbroken sea of green fields with a broad blue sky above. There, just ahead on the horizon were the jutting grey peaks of the Rocky Mountains.
Up the little Micra went, up into the foothills with nary a stumble at just above 110 km/h. Occasionally, when a road would present a sudden hill and the speedometer would falter, there would be a sudden kickdown and surge ahead, and we’d regain our lost headway and motor past yet another RV. With so few horsepower on tap, I decided I’d start naming them. “We’re going to need to ask Tim and Sammy to pitch in here,” I’d mutter under my breath, as the road snaked ever upward, “And Fred, quit messing around on Facebook and help out Pauline. You too, Lindsay.”
Through Canmore and Banff and past the world’s most scenic concrete plant, the peaks loomed larger on both sides, giving the impression that we were driving down the centre of the jawbone of some giant, fossilized alpha predator. Much further down the food chain, our little Micra pogo’d along, consuming fuel at a rate the onboard computer claimed was 6.5 L/100 km – I later found via hand-measured methods that this was a few tenths on the optimistic side, but close.
The Kicking Horse pass presented little challenge, and soon we were following a river running through the unlikely named Yoho National Park (a great place to take your ARRRRRR-Vee). The picturesque town of Field promised gorgeous views, but somehow we ended up in Golden beneath a willow tree, next to a trailer park. This was not so much with the whole picturesque thing: lowered expectaaaations.
With the kid fed and watered, and the avocado washed out of her hair (how does this always happen? How? I only gave her a slice of cheese!), we loaded up and faced down our next climb: Roger’s Pass, at 1,330 m elevation. We picked up an extra hour thanks to crossing back onto Pacific time, and once we crested the summit, it was all downhill from there.
Snow-capped and rugged Rocky Mountain range turned to scrubby desert, as we filtered along the Trans-Canada, inevitably getting jammed up behind slow-moving semi-trailers and tent-trailers. As we passed Craigellachie, the place where the last spike was driven into the CPR railway, connecting East and West with a belt of iron, I briefly reflect on the habits of the Trans-Canada driver.
On one hand, the Micra’s perfectly happy to zip along, engine turning over at a hair below 3,000 rpm, with a bit of wind noise but nothing unseemly. On the other hand, getting past the big rigs and the tail-wagging tow-trailers requires a little more oomph than we’ve got – you need a bit of room, and you need the guy in front of you to not attempt a world tent-trailer speed record every time there’s a two-lane straightaway.
Hammering up past a semi-trailer on one stretch and concentrating deeply, I realize the Micra is faltering and search for the cause. Turns out we’ve tuned into a local radio station (“Playing the greatest hits of all time”). “Not Phil Collins!” I shout over the roar of the straining four-cylinder, “You’re sapping its will to live!”
   2015 Nissan Micra SR Road Trip. Click image to enlarge |
Anyway, we’re soon past the slowpokes through Kamloops with a brief pit stop, and then onto what turns out to be the unexpected highlight of the drive. Highway 5A trickles down at a slower speed parallel to the 120 km/h Coquihalla, but it’s a gorgeous, winding piece of tarmac that follows the lines of lakes and rivers in a sparsely populated landscape dubbed the Empire of Grass. We stop for the night in a little log cabin that overlooks Stump Lake, with a strong wind idly drawing shapes on the indigo-blue waters, and the clouds marching in.
The next day dawns bright, and we’ve not far to go. Happily, one of BC’s new higher-speed highways lies in our path, so it’s 120 km/h down the Coquihalla from Merritt to Chilliwack, and then 110 km/h most of the rest of the way into Vancouver from there. There’s a lengthy stop at the grandparents to split the trip, which means it’s evening as we cross the span of the Port Mann and take up residence in the high-occupancy vehicle lane with just a half-hour to go.
 2015 Nissan Micra SR Road Trip. Click image to enlarge |
Total distance: 990 km, with an elapsed time of somewhere just over eleven hours, not counting stops. It’d be an easy day’s drive for two adults, but splitting it up with the kid on board makes life a little easier, and lets you explore.
And really, apart from a few sections where a Fast & Furious snoot full of nitrous would have been handy to get past someone, the Micra’s been a completely competent travel companion. Even with the relatively high speeds and up-and-down driving, the average fuel consumption has dropped to the point that the final fill-up charts an average of 6.4 L/100 km. It’d be possible to do better in a larger sedan with a less-taxed engine, but that’s actually slightly better than the official rating – thank you, more realistic 2015 fuel-economy standards.
Aside from weathering a gusty ridge or two, the Micra hasn’t been taxing to drive, nor felt unsuited to the task, and it’s been quiet enough that the youngest member of the expedition spent most of her time asleep. While this SR model has too many goodies to be thought of as properly representative of the base model, the Micra as a whole indicates that the idea of a penalty box at the low end of the automotive scale is effectively gone. Spending very little gets you quite a lot of car.
Or, rather, it gets you enough car. It gets you enough economy to handle commuting, a tight turning circle for urban hustling, and perfectly reasonable high-road performance. The Micra isn’t more than you need, it’s just what you need, and that’s a rather pleasant thing.
Of course, for this kind of money the temptation is to start hunting around in the used market and see if something a little more substantial wouldn’t be possible, but for a new car with a full warranty and an option to finance at not-unreasonable rates, the Micra’s tough to beat. Big country, little car: never mind what the dating profile says – it’s a perfect match.
Pricing: 2015 Nissan Micra SR
Micra: $9,998
Micra SR: $15,748
Options: $1,089 (four-speed automatic transmission – $1000; all-season floormats – $89)
Freight: $1,400
A/C Tax: $100
Price as tested: $18,337
Competitors:
Chevrolet Spark
Fiat 500
Ford Fiesta
Honda Fit
Mazda2
Mitsubishi Mirage
Crash Test Results:
National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA)
Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS)
