Production plans in doubt for Nissan's compact RWD sports car

Nissan\'s BRZ-fighting IDx sports car may not see production after all.

Citing cost concerns, Nissan is backing off from earlier plans to bring its IDx sports car concept to production.

Unveiled at last year's Tokyo show in NISMO and Freeflow variants, the IDx is a small, rear-wheel-drive coupe that, if green-lighted, would be positioned beneath the 370Z as a rival to the Scion FR-S and Subaru BRZ.

Unlike the FR-S/BRZ twins, which were co-developed by Subaru and Toyota, the IDx would be created by Nissan alone, without a partner to share the financial burden of engineering work. Given that Nissan's existing RWD platforms are intended for larger, more expensive vehicles, the IDx would likely require costly new architecture that would be difficult to share with other models - and hard to justify for a low-volume offering like a compact sports car.

Given those issues, it appears the business case for the IDx simply may not be there.

"Will (the IDx) become something or not is debated, but certainly not (by 2016 as rumored),” Pierre Loing, vice president-product planning for Nissan Americas, told WardsAuto.

"It's not easy to do, (and) if you do something like this and you manage to do a vehicle at (a low) price, what else would you do on this platform? Because frankly to do a platform for 50,000 or 60,000 (units) a year - it's not worth it.”