When you think ‘Nissan Pulsar’, we assume and hope the first thing that comes to your mind is the utterly bonkers GTI-R of the ‘90s. Known to us in the UK as the Sunny, it took the frankly dull Pulsar and shoehorned the SR20DET under a massively-scooped bonnet for a bonafide homologation special.
What you probably don’t think of is the utterly hateful economy hatchback that Nissan produced and sold in Europe between 2014 and 2018.
That was the first time the Pulsar had officially been marketed as such here, meaning to us beforehand it was only known usually as imports of the mad GTI-R, and it’s a car we’d quite like to forget. Yet things could’ve been very, very different had one concept been greenlit.
Roll back to 2015 and the hot hatch market was dramatically different to the one today. The Mk7.5 VW Golf GTI was strutting its stuff as the best on the market, although it had excellent competition from what would be the penultimate Renault Megane RS, the very late and brief arrival of the FK2 Honda Civic Type R and of course, the Ford Focus ST. Oh, and some rumours were kicking around that Hyundai fancied a crack at things. Wonder how that turned out…
Nissan had never truly offered a true front-driven hot hatch in Europe at this point. Sure, you could buy a Nismo Juke if you were the kind of person to chew crayons for fun or you could stretch back to the very middling Almera GTI, but that’s about as good as it got.
Then, Nismo got a hold of the Pulsar. It looked the part – a more aggressive bodykit with the trademark Nismo lipstick, a decent set of alloy wheels, twin central exhausts and crucially, the right badges.
This wasn’t an exercise in making something mundane look faster than it is, either, as Nismo has form for. Underneath the bonnet was the 1.6-litre turbocharged four-pot found in the Juke, but tuned to produce 247bhp – an extra 50bhp. That would be delivered to the front wheels and through the same six-speed manual gearbox of the gopping crossover.
Nissan kept its cards close to its chest on other tweaks, but suggested changes had been made to improve the response of the steering with suspension settings ‘honed on the racetrack’. There were even talks of Nismo seeking out a Nürburgring record.
So, what happened? Honestly, we don’t know. Despite the concept looking ready for production, neither Nissan nor Nismo ever uttered a word about it again. Presumably, the project was canned shortly after and ultimately there was never a saving grace for the Pulsar, which quietly went out of production three years later.
It’s verging on impossible that we’ll ever see a new Nismo hot hatch. A depressing thought, really, when you consider the only Nismo available for sale in Europe is the Ariya SUV. Guess we’ll just have to take that one to our graves…
