Nissan’s first big splash in the all-electric vehicle market since the Leaf is upon us and it’s popular enough that order bookd have now been closed. Deliveries of the new Ariya crossover start later this year in the US but if you were thinking of ordering one yourself, that time has come and gone.
Nissan isn’t the first to halt orders in this manner. Ford shut down the F-150 Lightning order process long before deliveries began. It did the same thing for the Mustang Mach-E and even Tesla and Volkswagen have been affected by long order books that outpace production.
Ashwani Gupta, CEO of Nissan, told Automotive News “Every customer wants to have it, and we don’t want customers to wait… Ariya has been successfully accepted around the world, even in the United States, we had to request our customers to stop the orders.” A landing page on Nissan’s website confirmed that customers can no longer order through that portal.
Related: Nissan Prepping A Modified Ariya To Drive Nearly 17,000 Miles From The North To South Pole
Of course, it should be noted that the Ariya doesn’t seem like it will sell in the large-scale numbers that some of the aforementioned vehicles have. Nissan hasn’t publicly announced how many units will come to America but many suspect that it’s less than 10,000 in total.
For comparison’s sake, the F-150 Lightning only stopped reservations after taking 200,000. When that happened, Ford was quick to mention that order books would reopen in the future for the following model year. We have yet to receive any word from Nissan about when the next batch of order books will open up for the Ariya.
The crossover is already being produced in Nissan’s Tochigi assembly plant just north of downtown Tokyo. In fact, the Japanese market has already benefited from some 1,500 units that are already in customers’ hands. Production issues stemming from the parts shortage have been blamed for the slow ramp-up.
Nissan originally intended to release the Ariya here in the States by late last year. It said that travel restrictions related to COVID also played a role in the production slowdown as supplier engineers were unable to visit Japan for installation and operational confirmation.
Have you ordered a Nissan Ariya or are you now going to have to look at a different vehicle since these order books are closed? Let us know in the comments below!
