Road Test

Your Say

Nissan Qashqai 2.0 Acenta

Test date 21 February 2007 Price as tested £18,505

For Refinement, ride and handling, driving position, SUV-like looks

AgainstToo heavy, cabin lacks space and quality, high load lip

You will, in all probability, be familiar with Twister, the game that requires you to stretch yourself in as many different directions as possible. But for those of you yet to have your lives brightened by its unique capacity to remove dignity and impose agony, you should know the game is always won by the most supple, best-balanced player. Everyone else falls flat on their face.

Increasingly, car manufacturers are trying to play Twister with their cars. Forced by the collapse of the traditional class structures to look at design in a whole new way, they find themselves being pushed, pulled and manipulated by their customers’ often opposing needs and desires, not to mention political pressure to produce cars with a foot in every camp. And this, the new Nissan Qashqai, is perhaps the most extreme example yet.

Its ground clearance suggests it’s an SUV, but its rounded shape smacks of MPV design. Nissan itself claims it to be a new take on the family car and cites the VW Golf as its nearest rival, while at the same time going on to claim it has the image of a coupé. Honest.

Any car that could truly master all these arts would clearly be something to behold. But the looming spectre of the Jack of all trades is equally visible and perhaps the more likely outcome for a car trying to spread itself so thinly into so many different disciplines. Can it be that the Qashqai really is all these things to all those people? Or is the probing prod that is the Autocar road test going to be all that’s needed to send the whole teetering edifice crashing back to earth? It is a 2.0-litre Qashqai in mid-spec ‘Acenta’ guise and costing £16,399 that steps up to the mark.