Nissan Latio Sport Review: Believe it or not,

At the limit, mild understeer rears its ugly head, but it isn’t something serious enough to send you crashing up the pavement and into a drain. Tapping the brakes gently helps a great deal, and proper weight transfer techniques prove to be very effective in this non-sports-tuned device.

The Latio Sport settles into a very leisurely cruise, doing its thing comfortably beyond the 110km/h speed limit up north. Overtaking the rest of the world isn’t particularly difficult, but a firm prod of the loud pedal, occasionally all the way to the floor is in definite order.

For those seeking an illegal boost in performance (and we shouldn’t be teaching you these things, but to hell with it...) a few big names have come up with a turbo and supercharger kit for the HR15DE engine, and coupled with the car’s excellent dynamic envelope, we feel that the Latio Sport deserves more power!

I doubt we need to say much here. The Latio has been a best seller during the better part of the last year or two, maybe even more (being the lazy journalists we are, we didn’t check) and we don’t need to tell you why you need to buy this car. With a price of $63,000, it brings up another point.

We’re not too sure why Nissan stuck the “Sport” tag to the Latio range, because instead of coughing up something that goes faster, Nissan has done up a compact car, brimming with luxury items normally found in bigger, more accommodating (not to mention, more expensive) cars.

Either way, you’ll be fairly hard pressed to find so many things in one small package. Let’s start with the plasma cluster ionizer found in the car’s air-conditioning unit...

Credits: Text and Photos by Amery Reuben