Well, these are two pretty similar cars we have here! It's only details that could potentially make the difference. Considering they both belong to the city car segment and utilize the same 5-door hatchback body style and the front wheel drive system, it all comes up to the specific petrol engine choice they offer. The first one has a Nissan-engineered powertrain under the hood, a 3-cylinder, 12-valves 98hp unit, while the other one gets its power and torque from a 4-cylinder, 16-valves 90hp engine designed by Honda.

Both vehicles got tested by European New Car Assessment Programme (Euro NCAP), with the Honda being a slightly better choice apparently. Moving further on, let's take a closer look at some additional safety-related facts. Both vehicles belong to the city car segment, which is generally not a very good thing safety-wise, but that fact doesn't break the tie between the two cars. On the other hand, if we'd like to consider vehicle mass in this context too, which we definitely should, Jazz offers a marginal difference of 7% more metal.

I don't like generalizing things when it comes to reliability, although it does seem that Honda does have a slight advantage, when all the models are taken into account. These are the official statistics, while our visitors describe reliability of Nissan with an average rating of 4.3, and models under the Honda badge with 4.7 out of 5. Some independent research have also placed Micra as average reliability-wise, and Jazz is more or less at the same level.That apart, owners of different cars powered by the same engine as Micra rank it on average as 3.0 out of 5, exactly the same as the other one.

Nissan is undoubtly more agile, reaching 100km/h in 1.3 seconds less than its competitor. In addition to that it accelerates all the way to 180 kilometers per hour, 3km/h more than the other car. When it comes to fuel economy the winner has to be Micra, averaging around 4.1 liters of fuel per 100 kilometers (69 mpg), in combined cycle. We can't ignore that 29% difference compared to Jazz.

Honda appears just a bit more reliable, although the difference is truly marginal. The most important thing when deciding between any two vehicles should always be safety, both passive and active. In my opinion, everything taken into account, Jazz offers much better overall protection, which launches it ahead of the other contender. From there things take a different direction, with Nissan being considerably quicker, thus putting more smile on driver's face. To make things even better, it consumps less fuel! I believe that, when we take all into account, we have only one winner here - the Nissan. In any case that's my personal view, built upon all the data available to me. What should decide here though is the way you feel about the two vehicles, and I hope you'll find my guidelines useful in the process. In case you have two minutes to spare I invite you to define your needs, desires and budget and see which car would be chosen by the virtual adviser™, among more than 12.000 different ones in our database.