Nissan has released a teaser image of a new sports sedan concept heading to the Detroit Motor Show in a couple of weeks. Its name, fittingly, is the Nissan Sports Sedan Concept.
Though details remain sparse, the four-door will herald a new design language for the Nissan brand. Styling cues such as the chrome V grille and more starkly angled boomerang headlights will be propagated throughout the Nissan lineup in the coming years.
The press release states that the Nissan IDx Freeflow and IDx NISMO will join it on stage at Cobo Hall for their North American debuts. The pair recently made a splash at the Tokyo Motor Show by showing a potential rear-wheel-drive Scion FR-S/ Subaru BRZ fighter with styling inspired by cars from Nissan’s rich past such as the Datsun 510 and Skyline.
The press release has led some to speculate that the Sports Sedan Concept takes the IDx concept closer to a reborn 510 (that is, an entry-level front-engined, rear-wheel-drive sedan) but we can confirm that it is not.
Instead, the Sport Sedan Concept’s name is likely a callback to the 1989 Nissan Maxima, the first performance-oriented generation of that model. The Maxima was marketed as the “Four Door Sports Car” in ad copy and even had a tiny, almost unnoticeable “4DSC” emblem on the door pillar. Furthermore, the current Maxima debuted in 2009 and is due for a refresh.
We asked a Nissan spokesman whether the concept is a peek at the next-generation Maxima, but received an answer that would neither confirm nor deny the hypothesis. No powertrain or performance specs were released.
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