January 2010- I turned 33, and my wife is now expecting a baby- so naturally we drove straight to our nearest lifestyle/crossover/soft-roader dealer and purchased a brand new Nissan Qashqai. Now this may sound like a total cliche- partly because it is- but it is also in my opinion the perfect car choice for our lives. I was personally quite surprised at some friends reactions (a Qashqai is NOT a gas guzzling behemoth!), but mostly reactions were positive. If activity at the dealers is any indication, a Qashqai is the ONLY car to be seen buying right now. Our dealer carries Seat, Audi, Volkswagen, Peugeot, and Nissan- the showroom housing everything except VW/Audi who seem to need their own space (to lord it up). I can assure you there were only 2 cars that any customers were looking at in the showroom- Qashqai, and the occasional glance at the new Peugeot MASSIVE LONG UGLY BUS/PEOPLE CARRIER thingy. I live in Finland, and Finns love a spacious car- they love a CHEAP spacious car even more, hence the Peugeot being looked at. The Qashqai however is something of a sales legend across Europe. When compared directly with my father-in-laws Honda CR-V it makes so much sense. The CR-V is about the same size, is very similar to drive, but costs €10,000 more than my Qashqai!! Northern Finland is also covered in deep snow for a good 6months of the year, so anything with higher ground clearance or 4WD hardware is snapped up here. Even more appealing to me, was the fact I could save money and improve fuel economy by ordering my Qashqai as 2WD. It is law here in Finland to run winter tyres, and where I live we all use metal studded tyres- which means that 2WD is adequate (but obviously not as ideal as 4WD) in even the worst conditions. The equipment spec on our car is amazing- with touch-screen sat-nav, full length glass sunroof, dual zone climate control (how on earth can air a few cms from other air- be a different temperature?!), cruise control, bluetooth and ipod connectivity, rear view camera and for the summer- 18″ alloy wheels! The boot is huge, and the rear seats have great legroom.
sunset across the frozen sea in Finland (-20C)
If we had to specify a perfect car for us and future baby +gear, it needs to have lots of space, do 38mpg, have sat-nav and ipod connections, good ground clearance, isofix seat stuff (not sure what all that is yet, but I’ll let you know later on this year), 5star NCAP ratings, be nice to drive (nice enough, nothing fancy!) and cost as little as possible while also looking awesome. We considered a shortlist of Nissan Qashqai, Skoda Yeti, Citroen C3 Picasso and maybe a second hand Mercedes B-Class. After seeing the Qashqai we never made it to test drive any of the other options! But we ruled them out for a few reasons- Merc would have to be 2nd hand, and also didn’t have the ground clearance, the Yeti had fake wood on the dash in the brochure- so that’s also a non-starter, and the best alternative would be the lovely C3 Picasso and it’s actually a shame we didn’t try one out. It did seem a little small on paper, but then it is a lot cheaper than a Qashqai. So we went to look at a Qashqai together, and frankly fell in love after one test drive! We didn’t hesitate, and on the spot bought a Qashqai 1.6 Acenta-RC 2WD in white, with 18″ wheels, and we’re really pleased with it. It’s 38mpg or 7.3L/100km on long journeys is a long way from the planet harming image of other SUVs!
Right, lets talk design- and first of all we come to the fact that nearly all the cars I considered purchasing were designed by friends of mine! Mile Nurnberger’s C3 is a delightful urban transport product- fit for the 21st century, but as I said perhaps not quite rugged or large enough for the outback of Finland. We were impressed with the perfect reliability of our C3 over the last 2 years however. Next the Merc B-Class has been a real grower, from when I first saw the design back in 2004 I believe, it actually seems to have improved- perhaps fitting in more as other cars ape it’s style. Mark Fetherstone created an impressive amount of visual drama and speed of lines in a very compact package that must have been difficult to stick to. The car is very spacious inside, and very square in plan shape, but thanks to some serious sculpting of the bonnet and nose it maintains the Mercedes DNA. A very slick job indeed, and clearly the reason Mark’s next assignment was to design the flagship SLS supercar.
2004 Nissan Qashqai Geneva Concept
Moving on to the Nissan Qashqai- this car also has a very close link to my studies at Coventry University, being design by one of my peers a few years ahead of me- Matthew Weaver. Matt actually designed the original concept car, for the 2004 Geneva Motor Show, while working at the brand new Nissan Europe Design studio at the Rotunda, London. The Qashqai concept was an amazing success for that studio first public design, and proved absolutely it’s worth. The crossover vehicle was radical, combining 4×4 ruggedness, with sporty hints on the upper surfaces while aiming for normal passenger car levels of space and refinement. The design was aimed squarely at urban dwellers, succesful young city workers that also would like to travel out of town for adventure. This brilliant mix of urban and lifestlye reminds of the original Range Rover, but the Qashqai proposed this in a much less tough utlitarian way. Bulging wheel arches, and even Mercedes SLK inspired bonnet bulges were shameless hints to sportscars and seemingly at odds with what was underneath. The public got it though, they had no cares at all about what was underneath the exterior. The bonnet bulges are a great example of this- inspired as they are by the SLK, and before that pre-war Mercedes F1 cars, where those bulges cover longitudinally mounted straight engines. The Qashqai of course has a transverse engine layout, but those kind of style over substance details are what the urban hipster is all about! The concept shows the key elements that made it right throught to production- the bonnet bulges, the curved and muscular wheel arches, the side DLO graphic and also the general sweep of the very low and sporty glasshouse. This was radical in 2004 remember, and compare with its competitors such as the Honda CR-V, a very boxy design which has since taken inspiration from the Qashqai. The concept did exhibit some of the early 2000′s obsession with clean but ultimately a little lifeless Audi inspired surfaces, which happily were actually improved on for the production car. Matt’s original superb sketches had a lot more sportiness and dynamic life about them- which again can be seen more in the final production car thankfully.
Matt Weaver's concept sketch
Another of Matt Weaver's concept sketches
So moving on to the actual production car- one of which I now own, we can see that the design has changed in detail, but the overall character of the idea is brilliantly maintained and in fact improved upon. The really brave, but very clever step Nissan took, was to make this car cheap and to make it replace an entirely normal Golf segment vehicle- the Almera. The Almera, and Sunny/Pulsar before it failed to beat the Golf or Focus, or even Astra in terms of sale so Nissan decided to so something smart. They built the Qashqai on basic mechanicals from the Almera, charged only a little more money than the Almera- but then at this price point there were no other off-road style vehicles at all. They correctly predicted that urban consumers couldn’t care less about the smelly oily bits underneath, they didn’t even need the extra complexity of 4WD (almost pointless on-road anyway). The production version kept the initial idea talked about by Matt Weaver- of dual personalities, with the lower body showing black plastic, off-roader inspired functional design leading to curves, bulges, and even that most sportscar like feature of all- the sweeping, tensioned boneline from front wheelarch right along to rear lights. The bonnet and headlights were criticised for being very similar design to the Mercedes SLK- which is an amazing fact when we consider how utterly different those two cars are in genre. An SUV with a sportcars body? Yes, Nissan did a crazy thing, and 6 years later we’re all finally getting what the hell they were on about.
2006 production qashqai
Incidentally, this Nissan was intended to sell huge numbers globally- obviously the only way we could actually be offered the prices we are! In the US the Qashqai is sold as the Nissan Rogue, and in Japan as the Nissan Dualis. The Dualis is identical to the Qashqai, but the Rogue is styled differently and is also larger (well, it is aimed at America- what did you expect?). The design of the rogue shows us interesting aspects to American tastes, as it essentially loses all of the utilitarian and rugged features- such as black plastic lower panels. The inability for any American to buy any car with black plastic on it is perhaps due to the “cheapness” factor associated with it. They sure love shiny things, and the Rogue shows us just how shiny! An advantage of re-engineering the US version to be much larger, and also to offer 4WD versions is that Nissan has now used the larger base platform to launch own very own European larger Qashqai- called the Qashqai +2. The 4WD underpinnigs have also made themselves available over here on any Qashqai, for people who just feel they can’t fake it with the 2WD version. Frankly the Rogue is horrible to my euro tastes, all plasticky and shiny and tacky- but considering it is larger, with much larger V6 engines it is of course ironically much cheaper than our tiny Qashqai! $20,000 is really not much cash for such a good car. The Qashqai is and was a gamechanger (to paraphrase Steve Jobs?) for the car industry. It solved a difficult problem Nissan was having in the volume market, by coming at that problem from a new angle. It continued the drive of 4×4 inspired vehicles downwards in size and price to levels that everyone could afford, but it also did this without using heavy, expensive and inefficient 4WD hardware. It created the eco-concious SUV buyer, it also took on the very succesful Honda CR-V in America and pushed that market to a sportier look which even the next CR-V bowed down to.
2008 Nissan Rogue (US market)
2006 Nissan Rogue (US market)
