Most of that extra money you’re spending on big alloy wheels (very cool-looking 19in items), a Bose eight-speaker surround-sound system, interior ambient lighting, heated front seats, a heated windscreen and the impressive-sounding Advanced Safety Shield.
Sadly, this isn’t some samurai-style bumper but the combination of 360deg camera, driver alertness monitoring, blindspot intervention, rear cross-traffic alert, adaptive cruise control, lane-keeping assistance and ‘moving object detection’. We can confirm that the parking aids all are a boon, the adaptive cruise control works just fine and the lane-keeping assistance prompted us to switch it off pronto, so all standard fare there.
The heated windscreen, as pioneered by Ford, snappily proved its worth before a frosty morning commute, while the Bose system is certainly an upgrade on most mainstream car stereos, thanks not least to speakers positioned in the sides of the front headrests.
As we’ve said before, the 1.0-litre engine feels pretty slow at first, especially at low revs, but it picks up nicely after about 5000rpm and is perfectly flexible enough for motorway driving.
The DCT gearbox matches this rolling smoothness, shifting wisely and fairly imperceptibly on faster roads; on a back-to-back test with a torque converter-equipped Vauxhall Mokka, the Juke just about edged it (and had a far better selector, it looking like a manual stick).
And indeed the Juke DCT delivered an impressive 43.5mpg over the course of our test, which included some motorway and a lot of urban driving, just 2.1mpg off its official figure.
However, the Juke proves problematic at lower speeds, often giving you a bit of a shunt as you try to power into a gap at a roundabout or accelerate away from a junction. How much of this is due to the gearbox is hard to tell, because we found similar dissatisfaction with the first inch of accelerator-pedal travel in the manual model.
Certainly the auto is harder to park, though: trying to be delicate as you manoeuvre into a tight space, wary of those fancy alloys, often brings you to a frustrating juddering stop.
Join the debate
Add your comment
I would imagine that most Jukes will spend their time around town rather on the motorway, so this automatic sounds terrible. Other reviews have criticised it for a hard ride, too, so it doesn't sound like this model is a good urban companion.
'This comes at a typical extra cost of £1500 and only a few official CO2g/km and should in theory be smoother than an old-school torque converter'
Why would a DCT in theory be smoother than a torque converter? Surely it's the other way round, particularly at low speeds.
Exactly what I immediately thought: torque converters are lovely and smooth in the way they operate, much better than any clutch, automated or not. It would be my favourite automatic transmission. I thought they were dying out, but some manufaturers after experimenting with DCTs have gone back to torque converters, probably on reliability grounds - DCTs don't have a good reputation.