Autocade hits 13 million; and what’s the deal with Nissan’s withdrawal from mainstream passenger cars?

Some time during May, Autocade exceeded 13 million page views. I can’t tell you the exact day, since it wasn’t a milestone that we’re socialized into noticing: I just happened across it one evening last week. It’s currently on 3,665 model entries, the latest being the Porsche 944. Admittedly, we haven’t added the premium brands as quickly as some mainstream ones.
   Since I’ve kept a log of this since the site’s inception (for reasons unknown to me now!), here’s how the traffic has progressed:

March 2008: launch
April 2011: 1,000,000 (three years for first million)
March 2012: 2,000,000 (11 months for second million)
May 2013: 3,000,000 (14 months for third million)
January 2014: 4,000,000 (eight months for fourth million)
September 2014: 5,000,000 (eight months for fifth million)
May 2015: 6,000,000 (eight months for sixth million)
October 2015: 7,000,000 (five months for seventh million)
March 2016: 8,000,000 (five months for eighth million)
August 2016: 9,000,000 (five months for ninth million)
February 2017: 10,000,000 (six months for tenth million)
June 2017: 11,000,000 (four months for eleventh million)
January 2018: 12,000,000 (seven months for twelfth million)
May 2018: 13,000,000 (four months for thirteenth million)

   In other words, it has had more visitors in the last four months than in the same period prior to that. If the June 2017–January 2018 period was anomalous, then we could say that Autocade is getting progressively more traffic.

Incidentally, Nissan, in both Australia and New Zealand, stopped selling passenger cars (apart from the 370Z and GT-R) last year, but it was only recently I came across their explanation. I had thought it was supply and demand, that people were heading into trucks, crossovers and SUVs more, but the official explanation is that Nissan knew about new Euro 5b emissions’ regulations and couldn’t be arsed to meet them.
   There are some supply and demand issues here: Nissan claims they were small volume, and the Pulsar ‘was mostly sold directly as a rental.’
   Still, to turn away even the rental market and hand it over to someone else doesn’t make sense, especially as a well understood rule in marketing is that it costs a lot more to get a new client than it does to retain an existing one.
   There’s no way Nissan didn’t know of this impending change, and it’s a shame it has exited a sector which it once sold very well in (remember the Sunny, or Datsun 120Y, of the 1970s?). With Renault New Zealand even more patchy in passenger-car sales, Renault Nissan Mitsubishi could find itself with a very small footprint here with passenger cars, especially as petrol prices hit their highest level yet. I’ve seen one sign where 95 octane is going for above NZ$2·40 per litre, and I paid a few cents shy of that last week.
   There are Qashqais and X-trails everywhere here, and maybe the group is perfectly happy with the economies it gets with those models’ Renault Mégane IV platform. And we’re not exactly a massive market.
   It just seems a bit short-sighted to me.


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