Throughout the five-year gestation that culminated this fall with the birth of its new minivan, the people at Nissan couldn't get one thought out of their heads: Minivan buyers don't want to buy minivans.
"Minivan customers don't just wander into a dealership on Saturday," said Bill Bivens, Nissan's manager for truck and utility vehicle marketing. "They're there because they have to get a product that carries people and has space.""We are targeting people who are apprehensive about making this kind of purchase," said Rick Lafferty, who manages the minivan line for Nissan.
Nissan, remembering the words of Mary Poppins, hopes a spoonful of sugar makes its new 1993 Quest minivan more palatable. To nay-sayers, Nissan offers a sugarcoated minivan:
- For those people who resent minivans because they're dowdy. Nissan offers an exterior that it considers more aerodynamically appealing and sophisticated.
- For those who fear a truck-like ride. Nissan offers a power train and suspension combination that it says rivals a fine sedan.
- And, for those who conjure up images of a Spartan interior with big blobs of unusable space. Nissan points to its optional leather seats and other amenities as well as its flexible seating arrangement.
"You hear time and time and time again in focus groups, `Don't make me feel bad just because I have a couple of kids,' " Bivens said. "They give up their two-doors, their sports cars and get into a minivan."
The company that does the best job of meeting this strange combination of emotional and practical needs will have the most success in the minivan market, Bivens said. And, while he says Chrysler has done "a good job of evolving" since it created the market in 1984, he and other officials at a press introduction here early in August said the Quest hits the mark even better.
Designed and engineered by Nissan, the minivan will be built by Ford in Ohio. Lincoln-Mercury will sell an essentially similar vehicle called the Villager.
Reviews have been positive, with one magazine boldly asserting that the Quest-Villager represents the most serious challenge to Chrysler's minivan domination.
After Ford and Nissan agreed to the minivan joint project in 1988, the task of creating a vehicle from the coupling fell to Jerry Hirshberg and his staff at Nissan Design International in suburban La Jolla.
He first asked for ideas from top executives and then "asked them to get out."
Over the next weeks, designers put together foam and plywood models of a minivan and tried to envision the people who would be riding in them.
"We become method actors," Hirshberg said. "When we do a vehicle like a van, we become van people."
And rather than sitting at drafting boards and coming up with "Buck Rogers shapes for a vehicle," the designers rode in vans and considered the vehicle's uses in a real-world context.
That's how the Quest's flexible seating system emerged. Like other minivans, the Quest-Villager seats seven. However, by placing the third row of seats on a track, various seating combinations and cargo capacities are possible. Nissan claims 24 possible seat combinations. Lincoln-Mercury suggests a more modest 14.
"Both companies agreed upon the notion of a carlike van," Hirshberg said. "Not a van that looks like a car but a van that had the quality, the level of sophistication, the level of safety, the level of performance that people ordinarily associate with cars."
Lafferty said taking a test drive makes defining carlike much easier. However, some concrete examples include the quietness of the ride, the low step-in height and doors that tilt away from the openings.
Difference between the Quest and Villager are few. The Villager's front end is most distinct as it borrows the full-length light bar used on the Mercury Sable. The Quest borrows styling cues from Nissan's Maxima.
"In our minds, if the Maxima has a uncle who's a van, this is it," Hirshberg said. That's also where the Quest gets its engine, a version of the Maxima's 3.0-liter V-6.
Price-wise, distinguishing the two vehicles also is a difficult task. Packaging differs, as does some standard equipment. (Anti-lock brakes are optional on the Quest but standard on the Villager.)
Nissan has priced its base XE model at $17,545 and its higher-level GXE model at $21,450. The company expects its best seller to be an XE model with power and convenience packages and a price tag of about $19,000. Lincoln-Mercury will sell its base GS model at $16,504 and its upscale LS model for $21,798.
At top annual capacity, Lincoln-Mercury dealers will get 85,000 Villagers and Nissan dealers will get 50,000 Quests.
That compares with the 395,000 minivans that Chrysler sold in 1991. Nissan's planned maximum output places it neatly between the Toyota Previa (52,000 sales in '91) and Mazda's MPV (48,000 '91 sales).
Both companies project slightly different futures for the minivan market, although both are rosy. Nissan expects the market to grow to 900,000 vehicles by 1994. Ford said it thinks it'll hit a million in 1993. The market didn't exist before 1984 and was at 650,000 as recently as 1988.
Bivens, who worked at Chrysler before joining Nissan, said people responded to minivans in the 1980s out of desperation for a vehicle that had space for cargo and seats for passengers. As the market expanded and more sophisticated vehicles emerged, factors such as safety, convenience and ride quality have become as important as space and seating.
"That's the cost of entry," he said. "There's no kidding the minivan customer."
The Quest's target buyer is between 25 and 45 years old. Lincoln-Mercury also mentions retirees as well as young families as potential buyers. They'll have a household income of $45,000. Sixty-five percent will have a college degree, 90 percent will be married and 75 percent will have children age 12 or younger.
Out of 94 million households in the United States, about 7 million fit that profile. And between the products they buy and the magazines they read, they're easy to find, Bivens said.
"It's an extremely targetable audience," he said. "We have an extensive plan to go after minivan intenders."