Frustrated with seeing Alliance partner Nissan’s Qashqai selling over 200,000 units per annum in Europe, while its rival Koleos cannot manage even 10,000 registrations, Renault is having a rethink. Its answer? The Kadjar.
This new SUV will make its public debut at the Geneva show but Renault has today released some images and a few details.
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One of the curious things about this vehicle is that it’s meant to supplement, not replace the almost identically similarly sized Koleos (see images for dimensions). What that probably means is that next year’s D segment SUV which Renault is planning to build in China will either be called Koleos or be the replacement for it. Think of it becoming larger to be a rival for the Ford Edge and Hyundai Santa Fe.
The current Koleos is built by Renault Samsung and it’s coming to the end of its lifecycle. Will it have a direct replacement in the domestic market? For the moment, no-one is saying.
China is going to be an important market for the new Kadjar. DRAC, the Renault Group and Dongfeng Motor joint venture, is currently erecting a new plant in the city of Wuhan. Two models will be made there as part of the plant’s first phase. The Kadjar is one, and a new D segment model will be the other.
Speaking to the media in June 2014, the head of Renault China, Jacques Daniel, said that a D segment crossover would built by DRAC from early 2016. He also caused some surprise by naming the platform – not CMF as formerly assumed, but the older Nissan P32 (also known as the Alliance P3) as used by the first generation Nissan Qashqai. Kadjar uses CMF C/D and we can safely assume that the vehicle shares a lot of unseen components and modules with the Nissan X-Trail and Qashqai.
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By GlobalDataThe Spanish-built Kadjar will reach European dealers from August-September and unlike a few other new Renaults due out this year (Espace, Laguna) it will also be sold in the UK. The brand is now the segment leader in B-SUVs, slightly more than 178,000 units of the Captur having been registered in the region during 2014, according to Renault. Of course this won’t be repeated in the next segment up, due to the dominance of the Qashqai. But 100,000+ per annum sales across European markets seems entirely possible in 2016, the first full year of production. It will need to be priced competitively though: one of the problems with the Koleos has been how expensive it is.
There should be good economies of scale for the plant which will be building the new SUV. Palencia already makes the Megane and will later this year be readied to manufacture the next generation model. BFD (five-door) production is due to commence there in November, KFB (wagon) should be added in June 2016, with DFB (coupé) to follow five months later. In that context, Kadjar, as a relatively low volume model in its first months, is a sensible way of switching a factory over to a new architecture.
Volumes in China won’t be large either, at least not at first. The DRAC plant’s combined capacity for the two crossovers/SUVs is just 150,000 units per annum. The brand is not well known but its partnership with Dongfeng builds on what has become a formidable presence between the state-run firm and Nissan Motor. Renault says it wants 3.5% of the market “in the medium term”, so the Wuhan manufacturing base will inevitably be expanded, probably as soon as 2017.
China’s SUV market is dominated by local brand Haval. Last year, Great Wall’s SUV and crossover division managed to sell over 316,000 units of its Kadjar-sized H6 model so the size of the opportunity awaiting Renault is immense. The similarly sized Shanghai Volkswagen Tiguan and Dongfeng Honda CR-V came in second and third with 237,404 and 168,184 registrations respectively (source: CPCA). Nissan’s best seller in the segment is the Dongfeng Nissan X-Trail, which, with a 114,459 sales, ended up in seventh place in 2014 behind the Beijing Hyundai ix35 (145,304), Changan Ford Kuga (135,998) and FAW Toyota RAV4 (124,680).
After so many false starts with building cars in China, Renault at last seems to be on the right track – the Kadjar has good looks, 4×4 credentials and it’s also right-sized for the C segment. While it’s going to take some time to build up the brand image, this could well prove to be the product that can do that.
What about Europe? Well, Renault is on a roll at the moment, its regional sales rising 9.1% last year versus 5.4% for the overall market. The Captur is coming under attack from new entrants in the B-SUV segment but for the moment, its sales remain strong. The Qashqai also shows no sign of fading but in 2016, it will be in its third year of production – seems like the perfect time for the Renault-Nissan Alliance to be ramping up production of a second potential big hitter in the segment. That’s the theory anyway.
