NISSAN QASHQAI
Does our car have any off-road DNA? We take it to the Jurassic X Prix to find out
WHY WE’RE RUNNING IT
To find out if the third generation of the best-selling SUV is still a cut above the growing ranks of Qashqai rivals
The Extreme E electric SUV championship was designed to take place in some of the most remote, isolated and challenging locations on the planet. And a trip to the 2021 season finale late last year also proved an ideal chance to put the Nissan Qashqai to the test in the sort of terrain it was designed for.
No, I didn’t drive into the deserts of Saudi Arabia, across the shifting sand dunes of Senegal or past the fjords of Greenland. Instead, I braved the wilds of… the M27 and Poole town centre. Extreme? Well, the traffic was occasionally hairy, there were some narrow bumpy lanes to traverse in the Dorset countryside and the car park at my hotel was on a really awkward slope.
Okay, so driving to Dorset for the Jurassic X Prix wasn’t exactly the toughest of automotive tests. But motorway runs, urban hops and the occasional B-road jaunt are exactly the sort of driving conditions that the Qashqai was designed to master, in so doing creating a new category of car that is styled like an off-roader but intended for purely on-road use.
In a weird, full-circle loop, the electric Spark Odyssey buggy used in Extreme E is a proper off-roader (Dorset might not sound too extreme, but the Bovington tank-testing range where the event was held featured some serious mud and big jumps) sporting bodywork inspired by roadgoing crossovers such as the Qashqai. But while the Extreme E cars were conquering the mud, the Qashqai, thankfully, didn’t have to traverse anything rougher than a mild gravel trail leading to the media car park.
Not that I’m criticising Nissan for the lack of heavy-duty off-road running gear: in every aspect, the Qashqai is designed and refined to serve as practical, comfortable family transport. It has excellent all-round visibility for negotiating tight spaces, such as hotel car parks built on really awkward slopes. There’s plenty of space to carry luggage, such as walking boots and warm clothes for a weekend in the Dorset countryside, while featuring the sort of hardwearing interior that is easy to clean when you get a bit of mud inside it. And the Qashqai’s raft of advanced driver assistance systems really help when driving in occasionally fraught motorway traffic.
Even some of my slight annoyances with the car make sense in the context of its mission statement. My chief complaint is that the 1.2-litre mild-hybrid engine lacks much in the way of character or responsiveness, but it’s hard to be too critical, given that it’s quiet and refined at most speeds, and once up to pace cruises happily on motorways.
It’s perhaps not helped by our choice of the six-speed manual gearbox: five gears would probably have sufficed, given the engine’s power, but regardless we suspect its nature would be better suited to the automatic option. Look, here at Autocar we love a manual as much as anyone, but on a practical family SUV, we would lean towards the more unobtrusive, easy-going option.
That’s because the Qashqai is all about being easy-going. Considering the capability of all modern cars, I suspect it would cope better with the sand dunes of Senegal than you might suspect. But, let’s face it, you wouldn’t really want to try. Extreme? Perhaps not, but the Qashqai is extremely good at what it’s designed to do.