Juke lovable despite looks

Style is polarizing — and it’s meant to be. A few quibbles, but new Nissan trucklet fun to drive, has some power.

You might call Nissan’s newest trucklet, the 2012 Nissan Juke, ugly. Or the Nissan Joke.

Really. As I first sized up the Juke, thoughts flooded my head, ones sure to upset the folks at Nissan: “You can’t drink this car pretty” and “Maybe they should call it the Nissan Puke.”

Certainly, its style is polarizing. It’s meant to be.

The main inspiration for the front seems to be rally cars, but the effect of stacking three headlamps — especially the secondary ones that run along the top of the fenders — makes it seem more like an alien life form than a seriously fun truck. There were plenty of people who agreed, saying that they thought it looked like a frog. This is not a great adjective for any automobile.

Meanwhile, others couldn’t believe that anything so cool was so inexpensive.

Some kudos should be tossed to the Juke’s stance, with wide fender flares and muscular shoulders that play against its sloping roofline. From the rear view, this is a seriously sporty little vehicle.

But its diminutive size, questionable looks and a platform used for the Nissan Versa hatchback and Cube didn’t promise anything remotely fun.

So color me more than a little surprised by how entertaining this little squirt is to drive. Is it a Juke? You bet it is. After driving the Juke, a word that means “to deceptively outmaneuver something or someone,” I was caught off guard at this brilliant bit of marketing.

Nissan refers to the Juke as a “sport cross,” meaning that the Juke combines the agility and power of a sports car with the increased ground height, practical body shape and all-wheel drive of an SUV. But its personality is clearly that of the Nissan Rogue’s smaller, punk brother, with a rowdy 188-horsepower turbocharged 1.6-liter four-cylinder engine and a six-speed manual transmission or a continuously variable transmission, or CVT. That may not sound like much, but consider this: the Juke is 21 inches shorter and 365 pounds lighter than the Rogue, which uses the larger Sentra platform. But the Juke is blessed with an extra 18 ponies in its corral.

So once again, the name fits. You’d expect this motorized tidbit to be about as slow as any economy car, yet it proves to have an amazing amount of power and the CVT

NISSAN The 2012 Nissan Juke is lighter than Nissan’s Rogue crossover but has a stronger engine.