Nissan Qashqai+2 1.5dCi (2009) CAR review

Live for the unexpected. That’s Nissan’s slogan for the Qashqai. And what you might not expect is a 1.5-litre diesel engine where the 2.0-litre normally lives. This is a big car – the +2 is 211mm longer than the standard Qashqai and weighs 1604kg – so the newly introduced small engine might not be your first choice. Question is, should you choose it at all?

A tiny engine. Must make this a cheap car then?

You’ll save yourself £1230 by choosing this instead of the 2.0-litre but £18,495 isn’t exactly cheap. The performance figures are less impressive than the 148bhp 2.0-litre’s too but they feel a lot further apart even than a 12mph top speed and 2.4sec 0-62mph sprint time deficit suggest.

The 2.0-litre diesel feels revvy and responsive, with plenty of acceleration on tap. The 1.5 feels like you’d expect it to feel in such a big car: slothful. You can row it along on the modicum of torque but you’ll soon give up wringing its neck. From a performance point of view, this is not a diesel for enthusiastic drivers and it emits a tediously tinkly soundtrack too. Cruising is peaceful enough though, once you’ve got up to speed. Eventually.

Doesn’t bode well for a full load

Actually, the Qashqai feels equally slow no matter how many people you pack it with. So don’t worry about that. Worry instead about the quality of the accommodation for your rear-most passengers.

Actually, Nissan says the third row is intended only for those less than 1.6m tall. And they really are just occasional seats for kids. They’re nicely trimmed, have proper belts and head restraints plus some padded trim either side of them on the inner panelling, but don’t take them seriously. It’s a real effort to get back there – you basically fold the middle row and clamber over – and it leaves you with virtually no boot space. Once there, you find room only for headless bicrural amputees, so don’t bother. I did it for you.

With the third row folded away – a simple task, and just as easy to flip them back up – you get a long, if shallow, boot and you can vary the balance between that and second-row legroom by sliding those seats back and forth.

2009 Nissan 370Z - Road Test

From minor but insistent Lamarckian enhancement does greatness accrue.*

*We once heard William F. Buckley Jr. say that, and it sounded cool.

At the Z car’s U.S. introduction 40 years ago, Datsun wisely chose not to employ its domestic “Fairlady” moniker, which Yutaka Katayama knew would have been tantamount to calling, say, the Corvette the “Cocker Spaniel.” Since then, the hyphen that originally separated the “240” from the “Z” has vanished, 1.3 extra liters of displacement have more than doubled the original engine’s output, an actor briefly made Mr. K a red-bespectacled TV star, and the car’s price has swollen by about $27,000.

Nissan refers to this latest Z as an “enhancement,” likely largely a male enhancement, rather than a whole new car. The company is being modest. The wheelbase is shorter by 3.9 inches, width is up 1.1 inches, length is down 2.7 inches. The larger engine (same V-6 as in the Infiniti G37) produces 332 horsepower, a bonus of 26, and it sits 15 millimeters closer to the pavement, which is now hugged by a true unequal-length control-arm front suspension. Although Nissan’s engineers had to add nearly 200 pounds of safety and regulatory bric-a-brac, the car is only 33 pounds heavier than the 350Z we tested in June of ’07, in part because the hatch, A-pillars, and doors are now aluminum. We know, because we attacked them with a “Big Sky” fridge magnet.