The Leaf is the first big splash on Nissan’s all-electric car market since it came to us and it is popular enough that order booking has now stopped. Deliveries of the new Aria crossover begin in the United States later this year, but if you were thinking of placing an order yourself, the time has come and gone.
Nissan is not the first to close orders in this manner. Ford stopped the F-150 Lightning order process long before delivery began. It did the same thing for the Mustang Mach-E and even Tesla and Volkswagen have been influenced by long order books that have outperformed production.
Nissan CEO Ashwani Gupta told Automotive News, “Every customer wants it, and we don’t want customers to wait. Aria has been successfully accepted around the world, even in the United States. We had to ask our customers to stop ordering.” A landing page on Nissan’s website Confirmed that customers will no longer be able to order through that portal.
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Of course, it should be noted that Aria does not appear to be selling in large numbers with some of the vehicles mentioned above. Nissan has not publicly announced how many units will arrive in the US, but many suspect it is less than 10,000 in total.
For the sake of comparison, the F-150 Lightning stopped saving after only taking 200,000. When that happened, Ford quickly mentioned that Order Books would reopen in the future for the next model year. We have not yet received any word from Nissan as to when the next batch of order books for Aria will be opened.
The crossover is already being built at Nissan’s Tochigi assembly plant north of downtown Tokyo. In fact, the Japanese market has benefited from about 1,500 units already in the hands of consumers. Production problems arising from equipment shortages have been blamed for slow ramp-ups.
Nissan originally wanted to release Aria in the States late last year. It said travel restrictions related to Kovid also played a role in the production downturn as supplier engineers were unable to travel to Japan for installation and operational confirmation.
Have you ordered a Nissan Aria or you have to look for a different car now that these order books are closed? Let us know in the comments below!