As requested by one of our readers we have the Nissan Qashqai in Nitro Green assembled in Japan 🎌 at the Kyushu Plant in Kanda Town with an MSRP of CAD $30405.
Fun Factor: 3
Can it Family: 5
Fuel-Friendly: 5
HWY-warrior: 4
Karaoke Friendly: 5
Baby friendly: 3
City Cruising: 6
As Nissan does many crossovers adds with Star Wars, we allowed ourselves to say that “the fun is not strong with this one.” Jokes aside, the Nissan Qashqai or Rogue Sport in the USA isn’t what we call sporty. Especially when you look at your RPM gages and press on the accelerator pedal you will see one thousand, two thousand, three thousand and nothing really happens and then when you least expected it, it hits you as if you V-tec or even turbo lag that's when you’ll get the full thrust of your 147 lb-ft of torque at around 4400 rpm with 141 horses from a 2 Liter direct injected engine. Our car was equipped with the optional 17-inch rims and with winter tires that did not help with the acceleration, surprisingly Nissan offers even 19-inch wheels for the Qashqai.
Can it family? We would say that you will not be lacking any space in the Qashqai, as for the driver we would suggest them not to be taller than 5ft10 any higher you’ll be touching the sealing of your car due to the raised seating position of the Qashqai. As for the back seats, we found that they will provide you with ample room to have one child seat and seat 2 kids comfortably seated. As for adults, we would only suggest a maximum of 2 in the back and maybe a smaller child in the middle.
The Qashqai gave us an average of 10.2L per 100km in our test, while on the HWY we were able to achieve 8.2L per 100km. We've also been able to test the 2019 Rogue and received similar results. We will post our review in a couple of weeks to see if it is worth it to upgrade to the bigger brother.
As for our tests of the Qashqai on the HWY, we would say that unless you're the kind of person that isn't in a rush and always driving in the right lane this car is for you, it gives you the satisfaction of being AWD and being stable when weather conditions get out of hand, however, if your planning to overtake in your Qashqai you'll need to be prepared and have enough time to do so as Qashqai acceleration will take time, the 0-60 will take you a whopping 9.8 seconds and in our test we've almost got 10.6 to 60 miles with winter tires.
The sound system is decent nothing to wow anyone. Decent enough to enjoy your music on a daily basis. The infotainment has essential functions, most of these functions are voice-activated only, some of these commands can be frustrating, especially when you've got to re-dial a number, the system makes you wait until it has finished giving you all of the options, before allowing you to repeat your command to the system. Apple Auto or Android Auto integration would be the least we would expect from a car costing over $30000.
The Qashqai has the place for 2 child seats and still has space for a small child in the middle, however, installing those car seats will be a challenge to most. The ISOFIX ports are hidden behind a hard plastic cover, everything will seem reasonable until you attempt to remove those plastic latches, they’ve been build in a fashion that is it almost impossible to take them out. We had to yank them out. We did attempt to see if other Qashqai’s had the same issue and it was almost impossible to take off those latches. This does impacts negatively the ease of installation of the car seats. They are so hard to remove that most users will not even attempt to put them back and will get lost after a short time, beyond that, it will be an easy plug and play to install the car seats, the opening of the doors is wide enough to accommodate the installation.
Where the Qashqai shines is in the city where it was made to be driven, it will give you the satisfaction of sitting higher, hence, giving you better visibility, we appreciate that in the mid-level SV that blind spots detection was available without having to select an additional box.
The rearview camera is of late 2000’s smartphone quality, especially at night the visibility will be limited.
As a final note, we would strongly suggest attempting to try the competition before buying the Qashqai unless Nissan proves with lots of incentives and/or low-interest rates. We found the Mazda CX-3 and the Hyundai Kona with the optional turbo to be more engaging and Fun. Both these entries are unfortunately smaller. We did notice that the build quality of the Qashqai to be better than the Ford EcoSport, we also had the Crosstrek that we would have taken any day over the Qashqai. Both have CVT’s, however, the execution is miles apart.
The Qashqai does offer amazing cargo space, and for someone needing a little city SUV, the Qashqai has plenty of it. We would Recommend the SV trim as the SL becomes too expensive and adds little tech for the $3000 price difference and 19-inch tires on the SL model is Qashqai specific and are not widely available.
What we liked of the Qashqai: Ease of driving in the city, cargo room, lots of standard features on middle trim. Okay, fuel economy for an AWD SUV.
What we didn’t like about the Qashqai: Very slow acceleration, uncertainty of the transmission needs to be worked hard to get any acceleration of the Qashqai, less then ideal position of heated seats almost under the middle console forcing you to take off your eyes of the road, ISOFIX ports hidden by hard plastic covers that are can be hardly removed, heated steering wheel button placed in awkward position underneath the steering wheel, specific infotainment function can only be used by voice commands.
