Test drive Nissan Qashqai 2007 - 2010 SUV

Nissan Qashqai+2: like twice two

That's really: with the name Nissan got to the point. Plus, two are used to hear this term in relation to the compartment: they say, the second row of the car seats is conditional, cramped; You can plant either children or your enemies there. For Nissan Qashqai+2, this concept becomes wider: it not only acquired two additional rows of seats, but also added a little more than two decimeters in length. Outwardly, such a cloak made the car heavy, but, as the Japanese assure, added practicality to the crossover. Let's check?
Remember the cartoon about the curious elephant who went to everyone with his questions?! The ending there was not at all children's: a hefty crocodile grabbed the poor mammal by the nose and tried to drag him into the water, where he was going to dine with the caught prey. Let me go, I am more! It sounded a refrain in the heat of the struggle of an elephant and a crocodile.
Children's cartoons should end well. And Redyard Kipling spared the elephant in his history: the crocodile fell behind, and the baby acquired an elongated nose, reminding him since then that it was time to grow up and stop asking stupid questions
Qashqai+2 is not at all the car that the chief of the Nissan European design center Stefan Schwartz presented in his sketches. It only resembles a light, I fry the shape of a little mess, although it has grown by only 210 mm. In fact, it looks longer than its 4,525 mm and more massively 1,650 kg of equipped mass. Why did Nissan crocodiles extended Qashqai, what did they want to teach him?
It seems to me how marketers whispered in the ear to a hard worker’s ear: why style? Give the volume, internal space!. They accurately intervened in the process of creating a car otherwise would not have been trumpeted in advertising avenues: we conquered the cherished centimeters, Qashqai finally became seven-seater!
But he did not. I pushed the middle row almost to the stop (yes, now the sofa with longitudinal adjustment) and hardly made my way to the third (laid out of the niche in the trunk of the trunk). As a result, the knees are packed almost to the shoulders, you have to sit almost vertically. An adult here will not accommodate normally.
Already getting out, I realized that while the trunk was mastering, I did not move the middle sofa to its place and remained pressed to the front chairs and indeed: I was always interested in the main question for what, and most importantly, for whom they put the third row in compact crossovers? In the hope that caring parents will put children there? Unsuccessful solution: if an accident happened with a collision behind, a trunk turned into a nursery becomes a risk zone.
But in the second row is cool. The door simply became wider to climb, and the sofa can be moved back, because the base increased by 135 mm. The ceiling has become above and there is a solid supply of the front, from behind.
The victims of such cordiality fell, as usual, the details of the body: another, oblong and higher, roof, increased doorways, and at the same time the doors themselves changed the grille of the radiator: now it has lost its central nostril and looks like a la Mercedes S-Class. All this also affected the price in the Qashqai +2 database is more than the youngest by 52,000 rubles.
Otherwise, they are similar. At the wheel of a new Qashqai you do not feel the severity of forms, you don’t feel the difference in acceleration for less than a second. Here is the merit of not only a brisk 2.0-liter motor (we got just that, but is more modest than 1.6 liters, with a capacity of 114 liters.) And the variator, as well as the interior and the driver's workplace.
Cosy? I think no. Plain, in some places booming, although perfectly fitted plastic panels do not revive the interior. I sit down and, as it were, dissolve in the flow of the Tokyo metro, where the army of business fighters in black and white fills gray wagons. But how collected you feel here! The review is excellent, the landing is high, comfortable.
Disadvantages and all the same: poor sound insulation of wheeled arches and luggage compartment. The steering wheel is heavy, but such settings are characteristic of all Qashqai, designed for sale in Europe. It is not easy to control the adjustments of the seat: to reach and configure the angle of inclination of the back, you need to have a thin brush and strong fingers. The suspension is permanently coping with small pits, not wanting to swallow large: it is not difficult to break the shock absorbers to the end of it.
It is much more difficult to argue with the fact that Qashqai+2 has really become more practical. But not better. Version +2 lively and with pleasure exploits the success of the first to be a mess, losing glasses for the appearance, but immediately gaining them for the internal volume.
An additional 90 liter of the trunk is not the entire bonus available to the owner of the new crossover. New possibilities of transformation, roof rails in the base, a more spacious second row of seats and, albeit conditional, but additional two places calls all this: Georgia! Transfer! Plan!.
Little Qashqai is completely different. More honest, or something: he is not trying to compete with more crossovers, but he knows for sure his advantages. Appearance, price, good dynamics
If you are partially ready to sacrifice them for the sake of increased transport abilities, it means that it was not for nothing that the elephant marquetologists tormented

Author: Alexander Mikhailov
Photo: Roman Ostanin
 
 

 

 
 

A source: Wheel magazine [February 2009]