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Nissan has a long and successful history of building great cheap cars. Case in point: the Sentra. Particularly in its first three generations (pre-1995 model year), it was a little compact that established Nissan as a company for people on a budget who didn't want to give up every semblance of fun.

This particular author, for instance, recalls terrorizing the streets of West L.A. in a gray '88 Sentra two-door throughout his college years. With its 70-hp, 1.6-liter four-banger, five-speed stick, and wobbly tires, it was no Corvette, but the indestructible stripper Sentra lived for high revs, yielded 35 mpg, and showed me, a muscle-car guy in high school, the indescribable joys of driving a fast cars.

Alas, the Sentra has grown in size and price. Now in its sixth iteration, it is more than a foot longer than the original '82 model, and its $15,000 base price is several times higher. What's more, the Sentra's frisky personality seems to be in the rearview mirror (the $21,000 SE-R notwithstanding), which partly contributed to a dead-last ranking in our recent comparison of six economy sedans.
Perhaps more important—for Nissan anyway—the Sentra's growth spurt left the company without a car in the very market segment—i.e., the cheap car—on which the company relied so heavily two decades ago. Enter the Versa sedan, the original Sentra's successor for the future cars for other people.