Nope. They're still hideous.
2018 Nissan Juke N-Connecta Review:
I’ve ignored these for as long as I can. But I can’t anymore. They’ve spread like wildfire. So, I’d better review one.
I wanted to avoid the Nissan Juke for as long as I could. There’s no other car on the market today (except for the modern MINI) which makes my blood boil faster than this hateful piece of marketing hype. I hold the Juke, along with it’s big sister the Qashqai, fully responsible for unleashing the plague of the “crossover” on the modern motoring world. So, don’t expect this to be a nice review.
Like always, we’ll start with the engine. It’s gutless. It’s a 1.2 litre, four-cylinder, turbo-charged petrol producing 113 bhp and 140 ft/lbs of torque. It’s not refined, being both noisy and unresponsive. Asking the Juke to join fast-moving traffic makes the engine scream like you’ve just trapped its toe in a door. The throttle’s also spongy for the first inch of its travel, meaning I constantly revved it harder than intended when pulling away from traffic lights. Which made me look like an arse.
It drives like a boat, wallowing about the road with the same sense of precision as a drunken gondolier. The first corner I rounded felt like it was cambered at a right angle. The Juke leaned over so much, I was afraid of scraping the door mirror. The steering didn’t instil much confidence either, being overly-assisted and unresponsive. I hated it.
And I’m confused by it, too. I couldn’t understand why the Juke was so sloppy, because the suspension felt like it was lifted from an ox-cart. It’s the first car I’ve driven which manages to have both an uncomfortably harsh ride and catastrophic body-roll. I can’t fathom it; it must have been twice as much work for Nissan’s engineers to make the suspension naff twice, rather than decent once.
Worse than the weird suspension though, is the styling. I despise the way the Juke looks. Every time I see one on the road, I retch. It’s a mess; it looks like someone took a fire-axe to the clay design model in the early stages of development. After which, they rived the headlights out and rammed two Argos kitchen spot-lamps into the front bumper. It looks like Nissan consulted a team of designers and implemented all their ideas rather than selecting a handful.
I also hate they way it pretends to be a high-riding, spacious off-roader, when in actual fact, it’s no bigger than a Micra. The interior’s tiny; the rear seats are unusable for anyone over 5’2”, the front seats are cramped and uncomfortable, and the boot’s barely big enough for the weekly shop. The driver’s armrest doesn’t fold up properly so, every time you change gear, you belt your elbow off it. And there’s nowhere to put your left leg when it isn’t operating the clutch.
Visibility’s awful. All six of the Juke’s pillars are like tree-trunks. Everywhere you look, there’s a blind spot big enough to hide a bus, which make’s city driving stressful. The rear screen’s like a letterbox and the heavy tint on the rear windows means you can’t see properly when parking it in a multi-storey car park. Or anywhere at night. It’s hopeless.
But the worst thing is the price. It’s far too expensive. I was quoted £300 per month on a three-year PCP programme. For a 1.2 litre, mid-range Japanese hatchback. I could have pasted the dealer when he came back with that figure. The bloody cheek of it. For £100 per month less, you could have a Fiat 500 Abarth, which is more fun, more stable, more powerful and more spacious. To buy a Juke outright, it’s even worse; they start at £18,580. For the same money, you could have a top-of-the-range Dacia Duster, which looks better and can actually cope off-road.
If you want a car that’s a gutless, ill-handling, ugly, over-priced, fraudulent parody of a proper off-roader, buy a Juke. If you’re sane, buy anything else.
Rant over. I need a drink.
Luke Wilkinson 2018 ©