There is still apparently quite a large market for this rather affordable Nissan sedan yet.
While many might already be writing Nissan off for dead, there are still some faint signs of life left in the Japanese automaker yet. Beyond talk of a major transformation on the horizon, it’s rather surprising to learn that its Sylphy sedan has managed to clinch the 9th spot among China’s best-selling cars this past month.
Yes, you read that right. The Nissan Sylphy is indeed a top 10 seller in the world’s largest car market. Even more impressively, it’s the only foreign-branded internal combustion model in the list.
The only other foreign name to break into the top 10? The Tesla Model Y, which incidentally sits right at the very top with nearly 60,000 units sold in September alone.
And really, what makes this feat even more remarkable is that the Sylphy in question isn’t the facelifted version that was just teased to the world a fortnight ago. Instead, it is still the outgoing model that has been on sale for about three years now.
For those familiar with the Chinese car market though, this might not come as a total surprise. The Sylphy has long been a consistent strong seller in China, even if its ranking has slipped slightly from its glory days when it regularly hovered near the podium.
One of the key reasons for its continued popularity is simple: value for money. The Sylphy offers a lot of car for not a lot of cash, with prices for this large sedan starting from just around 119,000 yuan (roughly RM 70,000).
Beyond the Sylphy and Tesla duo in the top 10, the next highest-ranked non-Chinese entries only appear from 17th place onwards, with the Volkswagen Sagitar (23,524 units), Lavida (23,113 units), and Toyota’s RAV4 and Camry just scraping into the top 25.
The rest of the chart expectedly is very much a homegrown affair. BYD alone occupies nearly half the list, with its Song, Qin, Seagull, Seal 06 and Yuan UP all comfortably within the top 10. Geely too continues its strong momentum, with the Geome Xingyuan taking third place overall after racking up just over 50,000 units sold.
As for the broader picture, Chinese passenger vehicle wholesale sales reached 2.803 million units in September — a year-on-year increase of 12.4% and a month-on-month rise of 13%. Among the 25 models that sold more than 20,000 units, 13 were new energy vehicles (NEVs).
It is also worth noting that passenger NEV wholesale figures hit 1.50 million units for the month, marking a 22.4% year-on-year jump and a 15.9% increase compared to August. That brings the total NEV wholesale volume for the first three quarters of the year to a staggering 10.44 million units.
