New pants please

Exciting times in the Qashqai.

Well that was exciting, and not in a particularly good way.

My photographic work regularly takes me across from Lincolnshire to Oxfordshire and back, and it’s rarely an eventful trip.

One of those recent return journeys started off as a beautiful late-summer evening, but all of a sudden the heavens opened and the road turned into something much more akin to a river. This is England, so of course we get a lot of rain, but the intensity of the downpour was something else.

As the Qashqai crossed what must have been a particularly deep stretch of standing water, for what felt like an eternity but must have been less than a second the tyres and the road surface were unconnected. However long it was, it was just long enough for me to have that horrible sensation that I was not in control of the car.

I’m not claiming to have an Ayrton Senna-like ability to cope with wet weather, but normally I’m not fazed by puddles and reduced visibility. This was a real bumclencher, though.

It would be unfair to think that the Qashqai was in any way to blame, and unrealistic to think that an all-wheel-drive version would have coped better. But in the back of my mind, I’m wondering if my previous car – the bigger, heavier and four-wheel-drive Kia Sorento – would have felt more secure. Who knows? It’s unfortunate timing, because those Oxfordshire trips had been making me hanker after the greater power and slightly livelier acceleration of the Kia, which didn’t need working quite so hard.

Meanwhile, I’m struck by the disconnect between the o—cial UK sales figures, which at the time of writing show the Qashqai to be among the top 10 sellers of 2021, and the few that I’ve noticed on the road. Where are they all?

Just driving along, minding his own business…