Nissan Cube

The Nissan Cube is one of 318 Nissan models in the MotorJury library, the catalogue that sets out to hold every car ever made — production, prototype and concept alike. The record places its introduction in 1998. The photography on this page is hotlinked from Wikimedia Commons under an open licence, with the photographer credited on every frame.

The era it was born into

To read the Nissan Cube properly it helps to place it in its decade. The 1990s were the decade of refinement — airbags and ABS became universal, Japanese build quality set the world standard, and the modern SUV segment was effectively invented. Any car launched into that world was shaped by it — by what materials, engineering and regulation allowed, and by what buyers of the day demanded. Its direct contemporaries in this catalogue, introduced within three years of it, include the Ford Ford Focus, the Peugeot Peugeot 206, the Saab Automobile Saab 9-3 — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.

The numbers, read closely

On paper, the Nissan Cube reads like this: the record lists its engine as 1275 cc Nissan CG engine#CG13DE / CG13DE Straight-four engine / I4 / 1348 cc Nissan CG engine#CGA3DE / CGA3DE I4; kerb weight is recorded at 1253 -; drive goes through 4-speed Automatic transmission / automatic / Continuously variable transmission / CVT; the layout is Front-engine, front-wheel-drive / Front-engine, four-wheel-drive. Every figure above is a manufacturer specification carried by the Wikipedia infobox or the open Wikidata record for this model — nothing on this page is estimated, and where a source is silent the row simply does not appear.

Its place in the Nissan story

Within Nissan's own catalogue the Nissan Cube sits alongside the Nissan N6, the Nissan N7, the Nissan NX8, the DeltaWing. It was succeeded by the Nissan Note#E12 / Nissan Note / Versa Note / Nissan Lafesta (for Cube³, Japan) / Nissan Juke. Design is credited to John Sahs and Alfonso Albaisa / Hirotada Kuwahara (final design) / Tadamasa Hayakawa (interior design). Assembly is recorded at Japan: Yokosuka, Kanagawa (Oppama Plant).

How this catalogue works

This library is generated, verified and rebuilt from the open record on every deploy. The catalogue skeleton comes from Wikidata, specifications from Wikipedia's infoboxes under CC BY-SA, photography from Wikimedia Commons under each file's own licence, and the ownership data from United States federal safety records. Nothing is written by hand and nothing is invented: every fact on this page traces to a public source, and every page is rebuilt nightly as those sources improve. Errors in the source record will appear here too — and disappear the night the source is corrected.

Why concepts and prototypes are in the library

Most car databases stop at series production. This one deliberately does not, because concept cars, racing specials and cancelled prototypes are where the industry thinks out loud — the ideas tested in public years before they reach a showroom. Holding them beside the production cars they inspired makes the lineage legible: nearly every landmark road car in this library has a concept ancestor somewhere in the catalogue, and the connections run through the era links on every page.

From catalogue to ownership

What this page cannot yet tell you is what the Nissan Cube costs to live with — that is a different dataset. MotorJury's ownership verdicts are computed from federal complaint and recall records plus EPA economy data, published per model year as the nightly ingest reaches each car. If this model was sold in the United States, its years will surface in the ownership database; browse it live or price any car yourself with the true-cost calculator.