Santana may not ring a bell, but between the 1960s and 1990s, it was a Spanish tuner specializing in off-road vehicles. Before going bankrupt in the 2000s, Santana acquired technical bases from Land Rover and then Suzuki to create models adapted to the Iberian market, but also exported to Latin America, North Africa, and the Middle East. Since a last partnership with Iveco in 2006, the brand had fallen silent. After 14 years of inactivity, it will return in 2025.
If Santana returns, so will its Spanish production, since we already know that its future model, which it has just announced, will be assembled in Andalusia. To relaunch the project, the brand was able to count on capital from a joint venture launched between Nissan in Japan and Dongfeng in China. It's clear that the model in question will be a pickup, especially since it will be a rebadged Nissan Frontier Pro. Designed for China, the model was recently presented at the Shanghai Motor Show and comes in the form of a plug-in hybrid.
To launch in Europe, it will still be necessary to revise the car's copy, since the Old Continent is no longer at all flexible on the question of plug-in hybrids, especially the heavier and theoretically more polluting ones. With 408 hp (4 cylinders 1.5 liters) in China, the Nissan Frontier Pro will not inherit the future Santana model's entire technical specifications. It should still aim for a 100 kilometers of autonomy in all-electric mode.
In Spain, Santana will not be the first brand to relaunch, and even less so with Chinese funds. Earlier, the former truck manufacturer Ebro made its big comeback, supported by the Chinese brand Chery. The brand uses a former Nissan factory near Barcelona to produce rebadged copies of Chery's Tiggo SUV (a competitor, or copy, of the Toyota RAV-4). At Kia, they took advantage of Spain's central position in Europe (and in particular the Barcelona region) for the automobile industry to present a whole range of new models, from an electric city car for less than 25,000 euros to an electric van.
Source: Caradisiac
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