Last weekend while travelling my hire car was a Nissan Tiida ST.
From the outset of this review I will point out that the marketing in Australia has had a heavy bias towards females with commercials such as THIS.
As a result I was expecting a reasonably basic city car that would appeal to the female part of the population.
This it did by being not being ugly and having a massive glass house to allow them to raise the seat enough to get good visibility. Unfortunately it was let down by 2 major flaws for this market segment:
1) The corners of the car are invisible from inside - making parking more difficult than necessary
2) No vanity mirrors on either sun visor. This is a huge missing of the target market's desire.
The car had 40,850km on it when I picked it up, and considering its a rental has probably not had the easiest of lives. I did not make its life too much easier. The motor really didn't have either a lot of grunt, nor a nice sound. It was quiet below 3000rpm, but above 4500 it just was loud - not any faster.
The Auto 'box was nice and smooth under normal driving conditions, but could be upset by stop start driving with on and off the throttle movements. The steering displayed a very strange tendency that at any speed about 50km/h it would become much harder to make small changes in direction, due to steering stiffness, but a large movement or once moving it would return to its usual light self.
The car would understeer, but in a safe predictable manor. I didn't have a chance to test it on any twisty mountain roads, but suspect that would have just confirmed this. All other parts of the car where fairly unremarkable, and so will not be mentioned.
Only point I missed out on was fuel consumption as the closest service station to the airport had a huge queue so I returned it half full.