DADDY COOL
Nissan’s Qashqai is worth spending cash on
CONTRARY to what we assumed as a predictor of its commercial success, the Nissan Qashqai was not named because it sounded like the Belfast version of someone saying ‘cash cow’. Instead, it was named after the Qashqai people, traditional nomads who roamed with their flocks of sheep between the highland and lowland pastures of Iran.
It has, nonetheless, been quite the cash cow anyway. The Qashqai made its debut in 2007 and it became the daddy of the crossover craze — or, given the rapid generational shifts in preferred body styles, maybe even the grandaddy.
If you’ve ever sat in your old-school saloon or hatchback cursing the guy in front in the higher car, blame the Qashqai, because it set the benchmark for everything that followed. Somewhere close to half of all cars sold now in Ireland are crossovers — we just can’t get enough of them.
In that respect, Nissan is a victim of its own success, because for a brief few years, the Qashqai was ubiquitous on Irish roads, with the emerging segment all to itself. Then came the wannabes, and what a long line of them it proved to be. When I sit into a standard car nowadays, the drop feels like I’m falling to the centre of the earth, and my face above the dashboard looks like one of those old Kilroy Was Here cartoons, with only the top half visible.
I wasn’t a huge fan of the original design, if I’m honest, because it was a bit timid and, well, meh. Fast forward 15 years, and that has all changed. There’s a lot more aggression to the car now, placing it more in the mould of the Juke than the Almera, for which much thanks. In fact, if it reminds me of anything at a fleeting glance, it’s the Toyota CH-R, and that’s no bad thing at all.
What once felt like a cautious chrome scoop framing the grille now finally has the confidence to proclaim itself out loud – it’s the V-motion grille, no less! – an immediate signal that the car means business. The LED headlights are slimmer than before, with boomerang daytime running lights too.
The wheelbase is longer, and the car in general looks leaner than before, without compromising what always was its USP — ride height. You still get a terrific clear view of the road ahead, and in advanced levels of comfort, because this is the best appointed Qashqai cabin to date over the course of three generations and a few facelifts in between.
My test car, the top-of-therange SVE, came with eightway electric Nappa quilted leather seats, tilt and telescopic steering wheel, dualzone aircon, roomy centre console, leather steering wheel and gear shift, nineinch infotainment screen and 12.3-inch instrument panel, and much more besides. Rear legroom is excellent and, playing to the family market, the wide rear door opening makes fitting child seats very easy.
The Qashqai scores hugely highly on safety features, both passive and active. You get intelligent front emergency braking with pedestrian and cyclist recognition, front collision warning, lane departure prevention, driver attention alert, intelligent cruise control with traffic sign recognition, high-beam assist, rear cross traffic alert for when you’re reversing out of a space, rear parking sensors, hill start and hill hold, seatbelt pre-tensioners, and seven airbags. It’s a very impressive suite of features designed to keep you safe.
My car also came with 20inch alloys, compared to the standard 18-inch.
On the connectivity and entertainment front, you get Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, an i-Key with memory function for driver seat positions and the exterior mirrors, so if you and your partner have different settings, the car adjusts to whichever key in in use at the time.
In this SVE spec, the front seats also have three massage functions, and there’s a tenspeaker Bose sound system.
As for the drive, well, that never really was the point, but it feels a great deal sharper now than in previous models and, thanks to the mild hybrid system working with the four-cylinder 1.3-litre petrol engine, nippier too, with a 0-100kph of 9.5 seconds.
There is no diesel version, but there soon will be an EPower model. A petrol engine will power a generator, the generator with power the motor, and the motor will drive the car, a sort of halfway house between standard hybrid and EV.
The Qashqai was off my radar for a few years as rivals came to the market. There’s a reason why it has remained popular, though, and never more so than in this revamp, which elevates it, metaphorically anyway, comfortably into the company of so many cars that challenged it.