Bringing up the gear
A gearbox hiccup and a taste of a supposedly comfier spec fail to convince us that the Juke stands out from the crowd. By Jake Groves
I must be cursed; three years working at CAR and a second long-term test car with gearbox problems. The Juke’s shift action had worsened, with third gear becoming increasingly dicult to smoothly engage, a few days before it finally went pop. After a frustrated shake of the gearstick in neutral, an unwelcome ‘click’ meant something had come loose. I now found that first gear would engage but the action felt incredibly loose, while sixth vanished off the face of the earth.
Nissan recovered the car and investigated the issue, pointing to the gear-selector cable not being fully fixed in place and getting looser with use until, in my case, it went ping. Nissan also said that my car was one of the first Jukes to roll off the production line, with a spokesperson adding that ‘our technical team confirmed there were improvements to this process – following the very early-build cars – that eradicated the possibility of this occurrence in future production.’ Hopefully, then, anyone reading this who owns a second-gen Juke shouldn’t experience the same thing.
Meanwhile, Nissan offered me a replacement Juke – a lower-spec N-Connecta model in the same colour. Just the ticket, I thought – after months of griping about the 19-inch wheels on my Tekna+ car, I could try out the combination of 17s and balloon tyres to see how much of a difference it makes to the ride.
Turns out there’s… not much difference. It seems the Juke’s suspension is at the root of its jittery ride quality; the smaller wheels and fat tyres on the N-Connecta model certainly do round off the edges of bumps and ruts, but the car still hops and skips over them like it’s going for Olympic gold. Tyre noise at motorway speeds, too, is only negligibly better.
The cheaper car’s cockpit feels lower rent; plasticky ‘leather’ replaces the Tekna+’s alcantara dashboard, while the thinner seats devoid of Bose’s headrest speakers (the PersonalSpace tech is on Tekna and above) aren’t as supportive either. That’s the difference £3k makes.
Even without the gearbox problem, I was struggling to warm to the Juke, and this spell in the N-Connecta version has done nothing to change this. Where once the Juke was a pioneer, a breath of fresh air, a bold and quirky carver of a new niche, the Mk2 no longer stands out in the category it did so much to establish. So, yes, the exterior styling is more pleasing to many, and the interior is more practical (and, on higher-spec cars, classier and cleverer), but too many of the fundamentals are lacking.
The story so far
The electric Jag has charmed everyone who parks in its driver’s seat
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Avoiding charging on the go
Logbook
Price £64,995 (£80,980 as tested) Performance 90kWh battery, two e-motors, 395bhp, 4.8sec 0-62mph, 124mph
E ciency 2.5 miles per kWh (o cial), 2.2 miles per kWh (tested), 0g/km CO2 Energy cost
4.3p per mile Miles this month
729 Total miles 11,166