Nissan stops Cefiro assembly

Nissan Motors Philippines Inc. (NMPI) will stop manufacturing its high end automobile model Cefiro by the middle of this year and will instead replace it with the recently-launched Teana, a ranking company official said.

Raymond Tribdino, NMPI senior manager for market and planning, said the new car model will be powered by a 2.3-liter engine, smaller than the 3.0-liter engine of Cefiro.

The newly-introduced Teana will compete head-to-head with the Toyota Camry and Honda Accord, he said.

However, the Teana will be sold for less than P2 million, more expensive than the 300EX Cefiro which retails for P1.5 million. The Cefiro Classic is cheaper at P1.25 million.

Tribdino said the Cefiro will still be available over the next two years as manufacturing will only end in the middle of this year. But he said Japan and Indonesia have stopped producing Cefiro two years earlier.

Despite this, Tribdino said Cefiro owners will not have a difficult time securing parts for their car should it need repairs. "They will not have a problem. There will be ample parts," he said.

Tribdino pointed out that the re-sale value of second-hand Cefiro units will not substantially plunge since historically, previously-owned Nissan fetches a high price in the second hand market except for Nissan Sentra. "The notion that the resale value of Nisan is low is not true," he explained.

Earlier, Elizabeth Lee, senior vice president for marketing of Universal Motors Corp. (UMC), the local distributor of Nissan commercial vehicles, said the Urvan model has overtaken market leader Toyota’s Hi Ace in terms of van sales last year. Urvan has sales as it accounted for 25 percent of the market share while the Hi-Ace closely followed at 24 percent.