Nissan Qashqai one of the favourite cars in Germany

The Nissan Qashqai has become the third favourite car amongst the German customers. In a study conducted by the German Automobile Association (ADAC) the Japanese SUV shows up in the last place on the podium, only behind the Porsche 911 and the Audi A5. The Qashqai also becomes Germany’s preferred imported car.

Besides studying the statistics of more than two million breakdowns, the ADAC's annual ‘Gelber Engel' (Yellow Angel) Award asks owners to rate how satisfied they are with both their car and the level of service received from dealers.

In the standings of this survey the Nissan Qashqai stayed ahead of cars such as the BMW 3-Series, Porsche Boxster and Mercedes-Benz SLK. The outstanding scores in both the reliability and the customer satisfaction elements gave the third place to the Qashqai, which was the only non-German car in the top eight.

Designed and engineered mostly in Europe at the Nissan Design Europe (NDE) and Nissan Technical Centre Europe (NTCE), the Qashqai is built in the UK by Nissan Motor Manufacturing UK (NMUK).

"This important award shows why QASHQAI has become such a sales success across Europe," says Simon Thomas, Senior Vice President, Nissan Europe. "It recognises the brilliance of the design and acknowledges the exceptional build quality that is engineered into all cars built at our plant in Sunderland, UK.

"The Gelber Engel award is the quality benchmark for new and nearly new cars and we are delighted QASHQAI has been recognized in this way."

For the 2011 award approximately 150 models were investigated. In the selection for the ADAC survey every car above three years is excluded in order to prevent that breakdowns caused by poor maintenance influence the study. ADAC is looking for inherent faults and embraces only vehicles with significant sales to ensure a realistic picture is achieved.

The results are published in ADAC’s magazine which has a distribution of more than 19 million copies. As the world’s second largest automobile club, ADAC has 17.5 million members.

Since it was launched in 2007, the Nissan Qashqai has been a sales success, dominating the European C segment. More than half a million examples have already been sold and last year the Qashqai received a major facelift in the spring.

ADAC Gelber Engel 2011
1: Porsche 911
2: Audi A5
3: Nissan Qashqai
4: Porsche Boxster
5: BMW 1-Series
6: BMW 3-Series
7: Audi TT
8 Mercedes-Benz SLK