It’s a bad time to be shopping for cars on a budget. According to the analysts at Cox Automotive, the average transaction price for a new vehicle in October stood at $49,766, and that’s not just due to a boom in high-end stuff. There’s only one car left under $20,000, and that sedan is reportedly about to ride off into the sunset. I’m talking, of course, about the Nissan Versa.
According to a report from Canada’s The Car Guide, “[the outlet] has learned from a company spokesperson that production of the small Japanese sedan came to an end in September.” Last I checked, September was months ago, which could mean that Nissan’s been coasting along on existing inventory for a while. The stick-shift model was already phased out back in May, and with prior reports from Automotive News claiming there’d be no 2026 Versa, it was only a matter of time. Needless to say, I’ve reached out to Nissan regarding this report and will update you as I learn more details.
If Nissan did indeed phase out production of its most affordable car three months ago, that’s a shame because America needs the Versa. True, it was a bit tinny and got blown around in crosswinds and took about 10 seconds to reach 60 mph from a dead stop, but what do you expect from America’s cheapest car? I’ll tell you what you didn’t expect: A flat-bottom steering wheel, cruise control, LED headlights, three standard USB ports, and rear automatic emergency braking. Okay, admittedly, the lack of standard Apple CarPlay and Android Auto was a miss considering the dearly departed and even cheaper Chevrolet Spark came with both of these phone-mirroring technologies, but once the Versa became the cheapest thing on wheels, it gained a little more leeway in that department.
Plus, the Versa has been on a bit of a sales tear. Through the third quarter of 2025, Nissan sold 41,463 of these little sedans in America. That’s up 41.5 percent over the same period last year, no doubt driven by necessity. When people need reliable cars with warranties and easy financing, and everything’s expensive, lots of drivers will go cheap and cheerful. Indeed, you can walk into a Nissan showroom with zero down and still walk out with a payment under $350 a month on a long enough term with good enough credit. That’s a difficult task these days.
I know, I know, there’s the argument for just buying a used Corolla, but for those with limited credit history or bad credit history, it’s often easier to get financing approval on a new car than on a used one from a reputable dealer. Plus, a warranty is huge peace of mind. According to a recent Bankrate study, 34 percent of Gen Z Americans and 28 percent of Millennial Americans have no emergency savings. For those who need to get around but can’t afford extra repairs, having all the oily bits save for consumables covered helps with sleep at night.
The Nissan Versa might not be quick, or massively glamorous, or luxurious, but it can be a ticket to a better quality of life. In some ways, it represents freedom better than any supercar or new 4×4, which is why I’ll be sad to see it go. Regardless of the production situation, we’re nearly in December and there’s no 2026 Versa on Nissan’s website. If this is indeed the end, we should all miss Nissan’s cheapest car when it’s gone.
Top graphic image: Nissan
I’m seeing a lot of “Just Buy Used” in the comments and I’d thought the post-pandemic car shortage had put an end to that.
Not to mention that if everyone only bought used, we’d run out of cars since the “new” ones wouldn’t exist.
At 52 (3 years ago) I did my part and bought my first-even brand new car. It was not a Nissan Versa.
You beat me to the punch! The good used will dry up. Especially ones that you can actually get fixed locally. The new ones that will be used soon won’t be easily fixed by you or your local garage, if you are luck to have a good one
I noticed. The Versa sedan was the last manual transmission cheap sedan available, and by all accounts the recent model year ones were not the awful penalty boxes I was familiar with from back in the 00’s-10’s timeframe. I was interested in test driving one to see how it felt. Pour one out for the last of the cheap and cheerful.
Same. The styling was quite crisp, no engine choices to agonize over so just buy the base model to get the 5 speed (!). I had it on my list to replace my Focus if I needed to.
Narrator Strong Bad: “CANCEL’D!!!”
Nissan Versa: “Ow! My continued existence!”
Narrator Strong Bad: “And…nobody noticed?”
Nissan Versa: *crestfallen* Ow…my feelings.
Hello, fellow generation-mate. 😉 FYI a new SB Email dropped on YouTube yesterday, believe it or not…
I saw!
“…cheapest thing on wheels…”
Four wheels, maybe.
“ might not be quick, or massively glamorous, or luxurious, but it can be a ticket to a better quality of life.” Please tell me this will be inscribed on the Versa’s epitaph.
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO 🙁
Up until, I think, last model year, you could get one with a manual. That, coupled with its spartan cockpit (and tiny screen) gave it a great 90s retro feel. But only people like us here value that sort of thing, so its days were always numbered. Which the Sentra’s may be too. Makes me think of Ford ending the Fiesta here in the states, with the the Focus hanging on for awhile longer but still always on borrowed time.
I think the Sentra is safe for some time as the basic design still has a good global presence in China. “No more cars” was Ford’s declaration for the US but globally they seemed content to let the Focus just fade out still.
You are not allowed to buy anything inexpensive anymore as the car companies claim there is not enough profit. That goes towards the large SUV recalls.
Most Nissan buyers are gravitating towards the Kicks anyway.
Which is also built on the same V-platform. I rented one last week (Kicks Play) in Mexico and it was decent for what it is, managed the insane traffic in Monterrey and kept up with traffic on a 350 mile Mad Max round trip to Coahuila and back.
They need to bring back the Micra. Those really fit the “slow car fast” mold quite well. They handled like a go-kart too.
But the Micra is “slow car slow” plus it’s unreliable, being mostly French and English
It had a 4-speed auto until the end, no CVT 😛
There is the new Fiat 500. Slow and it’s a Stellantis product so unreliability is baked into its genes.
You’re just bragging that you got the Micra, eh? 😛
We never got it down here 🙁
I’m from the states, but I’ve rented a few in the great white north.
Lucky you 😀
I wonder how the loss of the Versa will be felt by the rental agencies.
Sort of a bummer, but Nissan hasn’t really been selling this car to anyone other than fleets for ages now. Some dealers keep a couple in stock, but they’re always in sad as hell white, or gray. Just a dollop of cheer would go a long way to moving more of these to regular customers.
If Nissan continues to offer an array of Sentras for under 24k, the Versa just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense anymore, sadly. It would be awesome if Nissan had managed to find a way to make money selling these for 18k. But like everyone else, they’d rather have those customers adding a year to their loan duration and picking up a Sentra instead.
It does seem like some vibrant but tasteful colors inside and out would have gone a long way to sell these cars.
The lack of effort in that department tells me that Nissan would simply prefer not to sell them.
Same deal with Kia. When they wanted to sell the Soul, they made them available in tons of fun colors with interesting interior options. The last couple of years of it’s run, the only Souls (of which there would be like, 2) were white. Who the hell wants a white Kia soul, with an all black interior?
Car manufacturers know what they’re doing. If you want to be in the presence of a happy, well designed interior, or have your car look like something you’d be proud to own, you’re gonna be paying for it.
“The lack of effort in that department tells me that Nissan would simply prefer not to sell them.”
To individuals perhaps. Fleets seem to prefer monochromicity.
“Sad as Hell White” is one hell of a color name, props!
I just checked and there’s 64 Versas for sale within a 30 mile radius of me, mostly split between two dealerships. I’ve noticed this for years, any time I was helping someone car shop the low end of the price range was full of Versas. I don’t know about now but I’d say a fifth of them were manuals at one point. This area must be some kind of outlier, surely there aren’t ~30 Versas at most Nissan dealerships.
Most of the real work that gets done in this nation of ours is in the hands of people who drive these cars.
Indeed. I sure can’t afford a $40k new anything
What I expect for $20K in a normy commuter car is a used Camry or RAV4. Not a tinbox crapcan with a notoriously explody CVT. Which is why these things are all going the way of the dodo bird, and nobody but a few basement dwellers on the Internet cares. The original very Renault-inspired Versa hatch was the only one ever worth buying, IMHO. Only with 5spd though, lest one be beset with the Jatco demons.
The only cheap car I am sad to see go is the Soul. At least it was somewhat unique and useful, being the last low-floor tall hatch sold here, and not just another useless tiny sedan.
What I would actually buy is a minty low miles used 10-15yo BMW or Mercedes, but I freely admit to my privileged life.
Having now had to wrench on that first gen Versa, I can confidently say irrespective of transmission that they are absolute and utter abominations and truly hateful, awful machines. Only a Nissan-Renault combined vehicle would require the removal of the battery, intake tubing and filter, throttle body and intake manifold to replace the spark plugs despite there being AMPLE room in the engine bay to design the intake system differently. Not to mention the horrendously cheap everything in it. I get they were super cheap, but owning them can cost far more than it should due to how hard everything is to access and how fragile every component seems to be.
Meh, I don’t care how they are to work on, and any small car is usually a PITA, I just liked that they were spacious for the size, useful, and drove in a delightfully soft French manner. And given modern plugs, replacing spark plugs is what, a once or twice in the lifetime of the car endeavor? Not like ye old heaps where a “tuneup” was an annual affair.
” I don’t care how they are to work on”
You don’t buy them so your indifference makes sense; however anyone who DOES buy them should care since it affects them directly either in DIY hassle or added shop time costs.
Cars are cars, all of them have their miserable jobs. And compared to many, that didn’t sound all that miserable. There exist cars where spark plugs are basically an engine-out affair.
Though I do think that every newly-minted automotive engineer should be forced to spend a year wrenching on 15yo cars from the salt belt before being allowed to design anything. Bean counters too, though it would probably not help with them.
Its the execs that are ultimately responsible so they also need to endure many unnecessary hours of wrenching discomfort right along with everyone else.
I feel the same should be true of anyone in charge of highways. Make them waste hours of their lives sitting in traffic, no special solo commuter lane passes, no drivers except as a legit carpool. Same for any manager who insists their team show up to the office instead of WFH, that manager has to shlep their way into the office too with no reserved parking or other perks. The more they resist the nastier the whip gets till they end up in a broken CVT Mirage with no A/C.
I do like the way you think most of the time. 🙂
Though sadly, the execs won’t care. They would do their time, then still insist on doing anything possible to save a penny once the “performance based bonuses” kick in.
Oh I dunno. I think it’ll be like the steady drip of a water torture, slowly wearing down even the most steadfast holdouts.
If not then they’ll have earned their cred. Either way its a win
“I do like the way you think most of the time”
Same here, even if I don’t necessarily agree I respect your opinion. Mostly.
They’d just delegate the job to the MBA who would defer to the Accountant and so on until the buck stops at the engineers desk.
My point is that the cars of the bottom of the market will almost exclusively be bought both new and used by those on the tightest budget, so any poor or lazy design choices that jump a common maintenance job from a book time of 0.5 to 2+ hours, that’s a several hundred dollar price hike. Not to mention extra gaskets (throttle body and intake manifold) are required to change the spark plugs and coils, easily an extra $40 at a dealer. It’s indicative of designing around manufacture cost, not ownership cost, and its the sort of compromises that has given Nissan it’s rather poor reputation. FWIW my CX-30 Turbo has a spark plug change interval of 40k, so a good bit more frequent than you would think.
Designing around manufacturing cost is how you sell a car that cheap to start with. TANSTAAFL. Pay me now or pay me later, either way you are going to pay.
Is that really entirely true though? Not everything is so binary in the car market, there’s a wide spectrum to be had on both up front and long term costs. A Yaris is going to be more reliable and cheaper to run than a same year Versa. Toyota is able to build serviceability into their cars as well as reliability all while keeping prices very reasonable. Ford on the other hand strips every ounce of cost out of a cars manufacturing, still prices them in line with other manufacturers products, and then they break often, are horrible to work on driving up book times, and are generally garbage vehicles.
A Yaris cost more. Quite a bit more in fact, in the real world given the historical levels of cash that Nissan put on the hood of everything, and Toyota dealership shenanigans. Nissan MSRPs were rather more fantasy than Toyota’s ever were. Ford has to do it to make any money at all given the horrible cost structures endemic to the US automakers. As I keep saying, TANSTAAFL.
Very few people pay the slightest attention to what a car will cost to service in the long run. I do, but it’s fairly far down my list of things that I care about when choosing a car. All they care about is that it’s new, shiny, and they can about afford the payment.
Are those copper plugs?
I personally blame accountants and MBAs.
RIP
I’ve had a Versa as a rental a few times.
Honestly? I didn’t hate it. It’s like a Yaris in that, “It’s a car!”
I weld my foot to the floor and… it goes. Alright. Obviously I have to plan ahead compared to what I normally drive, but it as fine as some basic-ass conveyance.
I’ve met a few people who absolutely aren’t car people, but generally are reasonably sharp and frugal and… some have Versas. They were smart enough to disagree with the “never needs fluid changes” and changed the fluid on their CVT, and they’re still running around just fine. The thing not being that powerful also likely helps it there.
And now they can buy a used Corolla instead and have a much better experience. Or a Sentra and get a slightly better one for basically the same money.
Unless they can keep producing it (substantially) under 20k, they’re just eating into Sentra sales. I actually didn’t realize I may have been looking at Versas on the road, if you had asked me what car is in the pics above, I’d have said Sentra. You’re also looking at competition starting in the low 20s as well (i.e. Jetta in 22s, Kia K4 in the 21s) which are larger with marginally better tech, similar efficiency, etc. So I can’t see why nissan would keep the Versa around in our market unless they can still make money at like 17-18k.
I’ve seen a lot of social media content realizing the Altima is discontinued now too. But those are like pennies, there’s enough in circulation to last forever no matter how beat up they look.
Bahahahaha!
Just keep checking Copart.
Just a guess, but I’d wager this is what’s really going on, rather than actual consumers deciding they’d rather have a cheap Nissan all of a sudden.
Yeah, more likely it’s the pattern of:
Model is discontinued -> manufacturer produces a bunch to run out supply/production -> shipped to dealers -> plenty of inventory on the ground -> sales to clear out “excess” inventory/everyone gets shown a Versa/buyers looking for a used car at x payment get the “what if I can put you in a new Versa at that price instead…”
Part of the idea may be to build up a lot of extra supply so there is stock available for a while, but dealers have their numbers to hit and especially after the pandemic have gotten used to quicker turn rates on inventory.
Especially since Nissan has been blowing out the Sentra with a new model coming. Who is buying the Versa for $18k when a Sentra is $20k?
It’s funny: I want small, cheap manual sedans like this to exist, but I don’t want to be the one to have to buy one. Everyone else should be buying them!
I want small manual hatchbacks to exist.
But I buy a new one only once every 10 years. I can’t do this alone.
My local dealer still has 16 in stock. And they’re all white. It could also have something to do with the fact that they have many Sentras available that are priced up to $2000 less than the remaining Versas?!?!?
Sentras have often had higher incentives on them. Right now in my area there’s $1000 total back + promotional APR on Sentras, and $750 on Versas. The Sentra also has an advertised lease, Versa doesn’t. And that’s without whatever dealer cash may be behind the scenes too.
Regular Cars Reviews just covered a new, manual Versa through the lens of post structuralism.
https://youtu.be/FjkHvBVOnlw?si=z4XO9N4DUMROa334
It seems to me Nissan is getting serious about fixing their quality – or more specifically their reputation of (no) quality. Getting rid of the Versa makes sense in that aspect. But the author’s points about people needing cheap transportation are valid and its unfortunate for those in that market segment.
With the demise of the stick shift Versa, the US lost its last car with a 5-speed manual transmission. The few remaining manuals all have 6 or more forward gears.
Interesting note. I wonder how long ago the 4-speed disappeared? I remember the first used car I looked at as a kid was an 89 Civic DX hatchback with a 4-speed.
1996 Toyota Tercel
https://www.autoweek.com/car-life/columns/a34301141/what-was-the-final-us-market-car-to-get-a-4-speed-manual-transmission/
Is the loss of the 5 speed a bad thing?
Not for me to say. I’ve owned 3,4,5, and 6-speed manual vehicles, and they all seemed adequate to me.
I read many years ago that Mazda stopped at 6 speeds in their automatics because in their opinion that was the peak of efficiency benefit for complexity detriment.
Sad to see this go since it was not only under $20k but also didn’t feel like a penalty box unlike the also recently discontinued Mirage.
That said, Nissan is treating the Sentra well and it’s still under $22k MSRP so it seems wise to focus on that instead.
The new Sentra is getting pretty positive reviews. It seems like a perfectly decent little car.
I lucked out on a work trip and got a brand new 2025 Sentra as a rental. I was very impressed for the price point they’re sold at. The 26 model looks to be even better.
As much flak as the JATCO CVTs can deserve, as those spray-on cylinder liners that left Sentra SE-R Spec Vs with no compression, plus whatever Rogue drivers are on… Nissan does actually do some things right.
A great example is the Pathfinder. It’s not BOF any more but it’s… well, quite competent. VQ is a known quantity. It can tow 6,000lbs in the right trims. The interior is good for the price. It ticks the boxes.
Yes, Highlanders are very nice, but you can get a deal on a Pathfinder, which taken care of you’re getting 20-25 years out of it like the Toyota.
The Highlander DOES win on operating costs, especially the hybrid, and will win on depreciation. Though if you keep a vehicle 20-25 years, depreciation doesn’t matter. So I wonder how long it takes for the pricier Toyotas to outpace the Pathfinder in long-term TCO.
The price gap between a CVT Versa and a Sentra had already gotten slim, and would narrow further with higher incentives on the Sentra.
My thoughts as well. Margins on the Versa were already thin so it didn’t make sense to update it when the Sentra is close enough and likely getting the same customers.
OOF!