The Nissan Juke was made by ā and for ā people with a healthy disdain for convention.
Five years after its launch and following a significant facelift, this car remains the most daring and esoteric in the class that it founded. Thatās no small achievement.
Drive a Juke for any length of time and youāll conclude that it doesnāt exist to be practical, comfortable or dual-purpose capable, nor particularly stylish or sporty. It exists to be different, visually characterful and little more.
And while the Jukeās direct rivals have filtered into their variously more straightforward roles on the periphery of the class, the Nissan's identity has only become clearer. Most who buy a Juke probably wouldnāt feel the need to explain themselves in any more complicated way than by saying āI fancied oneā. Itās what marketing departments like to call āemotional appealā.
Furthermore, āemotionalā cars are the ones that lend themselves best to performance makeovers, because theyāre that little bit more exciting from the word go. An engineer might disagree, but in most modern car companies engineers do what theyāre told ā usually by designers, marketeers or corporate strategists.
That is how it came to pass that, in 2013, Nissan introduced its new factory performance brand to the UK with the Juke Nismo. This performance crossover was a punt ā but quite a clever one. A likeable enough thing so long as it wasnāt taken or driven too seriously, it was pitched at the more usability-minded end of the hot hatch market. It has proved popular, accounting for three per cent of the Jukeās 130,000-unit annual European production volume.