An entertaining little ride
Unusually stylish two-box car is more enjoyable than expected
Kicks just started getting easier to find.
Or, depending on your musical tastes and/or age, you might Foster the People to pump up your Kicks.
Whatever, it’s the Nissan Kicks, yet another SUV-ish vehicle sliding just under Qashqai in Nissan’s lineup.
As former colleague Alex Law used to put it, Kicks would appear to be a sport-cute.
It is on sale now starting at $17,998 for the S trim level. Then $20,898 gets you the SV, while my tester was the range-topping SR at $22,798.
I say SUV-ish because the term SUV tends to imply four-wheel drive, which Kicks offers in other markets, but not ours.
Kicks frankly is more like a small station wagon, although that term is marketing death these days for reasons that continue to escape me.
It is indeed a cute little thing, with perhaps more style than a two-box car usually offers.
For your base starting price you can order your Kicks in any colour you want, as long as it’s black.
Fork over another $135 to $450 and a wider palette emerges, some of which come with a contrasting roof colour.
My tester was gunmetal grey with an orange roof (a $135 hit to the sticker), which actually looked better to me that it may sound.
The SR trim level comes with excellent LED headlights, bright enough you could play night baseball under them. Living in the country as I do, you can never have headlights that are too good.
The interior is well-finished, with quality fabrics and plastics, nicely put together.
Nissan’s “Zero Gravity” front seats provide excellent longdrive comfort and support. On this trim level the upholstery is called Prime-Tex. No idea what it is, but it looks and feels good. It has orange stitching accents throughout, apparently even when you don’t order the orange roof.
There’s a big centre screen on this trim level with a host of functions available, but not Sat Nav. It does offer Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, and there is a school of thought that believes that dedicated in-car navigation will eventually go away when everybody has a phone that’s probably smarter than your car.
The radio system in this car includes Sirius XM satellite radio, which for some reason just failed to work one day. Not sure if that was a problem with the car or with the satellite service that day; like the proverbial cat, it came back the very next day.
Proper round knobs control that radio and HVAC. Oddly, the lowest temperature setting is only 18 degrees. I needed it way cooler than that during my hot summer road test period.
The 1.6-litre engine develops 125 horsepower and 115 lb.-ft. of torque at 4,000 r.p.m. Modest enough numbers, but the car only weighs around 1,200 kg, some 100 to 175 kg less than comparable vehicles. So Kicks feels decently quick off the line as the much-loathed-by-justabout-everyone-but-me Continuously Variable Transmission (CVT) lets the engine find its best rev range for optimum acceleration.
There is a lot less motorboating with this transmission than in most CVTs — that’s the sensation that the engine is hunting up and down the rev range looking for the best performance. There are simulated gear changes to make it feel more like a conventional auto-box which has to hurt the efficiency a little, but it still returns good Transport Canada numbers at 7.7 and 6.6 litres/100 km City/Highway.
Overall gearing was tall enough to make the car reasonably quiet on the highway.
At idle, the engine occasional- ly started revving at very low r.p.m. with the AirCon on, and a strange rattly noise came out of the engine room. No idea what that was, and it wasn’t consistent enough to chase down.
The car rides decently; only severe potholes and frost heaves — Toronto’s specialty — cause undo concern to riders. Steering is precise and direct — it’s an entertaining little car to toss around.
Kicks at this level also offers Nissan’s excellent backup camera system. Views from cameras located at the front, back and sides are combined as if by magic to create an overhead view of the car as you back into your parking spot.
In sum then, Nissan’s Kicks was a bit of a surprise in that I wasn’t really expecting much, but ended up enjoying driving this little car.
The compact quasi-SUV segment is a crowded field these days, with a host of entries vying for your attention. Kicks’ failure to offer fourwheel drive like most of the competition might create some angst for some prospects.
Never mind that with proper tires (i.e. not the “no-season” tires that come with this and most new cars these days), you will have all the traction you will ever need, without the weight and fuel consumption penalties that four-wheel drive usually entails.
Based on my week in the car, if you are one of the many shoppers in this segment, you should at least give the tires of the Kicks a metaphorical kick.