Japan marque
Nissan in the UK
Nissan sold its first cars here as Datsun from the late 1960s and opened its Sunderland plant in 1986, which has built Qashqai and Juke for the UK and Europe ever since. The Qashqai created the family crossover class in Britain and has been in the new car top three for years, so it is now equally dominant used. The Micra is the other volume story, with three decades of small hatchbacks still in daily use.
There is no reliability figure for Nissan as a marque that this site could cite. What circulates instead is survey data from panels that select themselves, warranty claim rates published by companies with a product to sell, and averages built by choosing which years and variants to count.
Each of those choices moves the answer by several percentage points, and none of them is a measurement a reader could go and check. A number printed beside the Nissan badge here would be our arithmetic wearing somebody else's name.
What is genuinely knowable is one car at a time: its own invoices, its own service record and what the common repairs on that model actually cost when they arrive.
No fault ordering is published for this marque
Model by model
Every Nissan line we hold a record for
| Model | Years sold in the UK | Body styles | Fuel types | Fuel options |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Qashqai | since 2007 | SUV | Petrol, Diesel, Petrol hybrid | 3 |
| Juke | since 2010 | SUV | Petrol, Diesel, Petrol hybrid | 3 |
| Micra | Not recorded | Hatchback | Petrol, Diesel, Electric | 3 |
| Note | 2004 to 2017 | MPV | Petrol, Diesel | 2 |
| X-Trail | Not recorded | SUV | Petrol, Diesel, Petrol hybrid | 3 |
| Leaf | since 2011 | Hatchback | Electric | 1 |
Before you buy one
What the Nissan record does and does not settle
There are 6 Nissan model lines here and the oldest of them went on sale in Britain in 2004. Of those, 3 are still sold new and 3 have finished. A finished line is not automatically a worse buy, but it fixes the newest example you will ever find and it decides how long the parts supply has had to run. The sales period is missing for 2 of these lines, and those pages say as much rather than printing a range we cannot cite.
Between them those models have been sold here with 4 different fuel types: petrol, diesel, petrol hybrid and electric. That spread is the practical reason one figure for the whole marque would be no use to anybody standing on a forecourt. Electric cars lost their road tax exemption on 1 April 2025, so an electric one now pays the same standard rate as a petrol one of the same age. The alternative fuel discount that used to shave a little off hybrids ended on the same date, so hybrid badging no longer changes the bill. Diesels carry a particulate filter, and a car used only for short cold journeys will keep blocking it until the driving pattern changes.
Those lines were bodied 3 ways: SUV, hatchback and MPV. The MPVs carry a second and sometimes third row of belts, and every belt, buckle and mounting is a wear item. The four wheel drive versions carry more driveline than the two wheel drive ones, and driveshaft boots and propshaft joints are all inspected.
Examples across this marque straddle two road tax regimes: CO2 bands for cars first registered between 1 March 2001 and 31 March 2017, and the flat standard rate for anything registered on or after 1 April 2017. That is why the tax figure on each model page names the year and the engine it applies to, and why it is safer to read the V5C than to take a rate from a badge.
What goes wrong on a Nissan is decided by the individual car and the person who owned it last, not by the marque. Two examples of the same model and year, one serviced on time and one not, are in completely different condition, which is the honest reason a marque average would mislead you even if somebody published one. The invoices for the car in front of you name what was actually replaced, when, and at what mileage. Read those instead.