Gadgetory

Nissan's big on odd lately witnessed the Murano cross cab the cube and this thing let's drive the 2012 Nissan Juke SV get used to being stared at and checked the tech not hard to spot a Nissan Juke never has any production car looked more like a frog look at the face of this thing that's little bulging jutting lower jaw and big old bug eyes the taillights do something similar and the whole car just kind of bulges roundly in odd ways all around but what they've got here is a very distinctive kind of a compact sporty crossover thing let's get inside now inside the Juke everything's kind of high and upright it fits the look of the car on the outside and it's kind of a jaunty thing lots of rounded shapes that match that weird-looking face it's got let's get to the center stack here we don't have navigation but we do have this interesting screen here you get this on the SV or SL the upper two trim levels two buttons climate and D mode look what happens when I hit climate or drive mode it changes not just the screen but the labels on the buttons in the drive mode setting you've got normal sport and eco self-explanatory but each one brings up special driving gauges on the screen to show either your eco level how Greenlee you're driving here's my boost I can also get a g-force gauge further eco information above that is a fairly standard Nissan audio system you see this in a lot of their cars right now I guess that's a doubled in space so you do have a pretty good blank palette here to work with if you want to go down and buy an aftermarket head unit otherwise you're going to have am/fm no HD radio we got a CD slot right here iPod connector in this case means a true iPod cable dedicated over in the glove box there are other trim levels that have a USB port over here which will support USB drives and an iPod so you get a little more flexibility I would recommend that now upgrading to the top trim the SL or get the navigation packages we don't have here obviously and you'll also get an upgraded audio system with a Rockford Fosgate sub otherwise you've just got these six kind of none particular speakers around the cabin they sound okay but not great now depending what Nissan material is you do your research on you either get a standard CVT or a standard six-speed manual I think most of these are going to ship with a CVT but it does add $500 to the cost so we'll call that the optional transmission and Nissan does these very well you go back to drive typically over here for shift ability Sport is not engaged here it's up here in the D mode like I showed you remember it's a CVT it doesn't really have gears anyway so when you're shifting you're going through these sort of synthetic belt points it's a transmission that has one long continuous range of variable ratios but they make it seem like gears based on programming now somewhere under all this is the engine and I'm not surprised we can't see it that's tiny the 1.6 liter inline-4 with a turbo you can see that back there and direct injection those are the two darling technologies of small displacement engines these days and the results speak for themselves 188 horsepower out of this little guy 177 foot-pounds of torque gets this 3000 pound crossover up to 60 in a round seven seconds you've got a choice of various power trains that will affect the mpg but the best you can do is 2732 front-wheel drive with a CVT if you get all-wheel-drive or a manual or a combination thereof you're going to get down to about 25 30 mpg okay let's go drive our froggy friend now the first thing you notice off the bat is it has a remarkable amount of power for a high mileage compact inexpensive car under eighty eight horse is the real deal and good torque as well you don't get a huge amount of turbo lag or turbo slop in this vehicle good credit to Nissan for designing an engine that has direct injection as well as a turbo that adds precision and they've done a really good job of programming this CVT gearbox to this engine and that's something you can do very well with the CVT because it can select any ratio it wants within its high to low range there are no set gears now the interesting question is do you get the torque vectoring all-wheel-drive and kind of take this thing in the direction of a kind of an inexpensive pocket rally monster I don't know we've got the front-wheel drive car here and I find that handles front-wheel drive nastiness like torque steer pretty well to add a couple grand or more for an all-wheel drive system than its performance oriented I don't know if I would do that in a car in this price class the ride is nothing unusual it's typically sprung and lightweight the car weighs about 3,000 pounds it doesn't feel truck ish it doesn't feel tinny and it feels kind of tall all the time which i think is suitable for the car I didn't find myself missing paddle shifters on this car because this is a really quick shifting transmission I mean really quick and the paddles would seem to complement that reaching for the gear shift isn't that big a deal but they missed a small opportunity there as you go from sport mode to normal mode you can really feel a difference in the throttle mapping is what I'm really feeling there it may be transmission oriented too but it's hard to tell with a CVT and the Eco mode as you can imagine really takes some of the SAP out of this thing but the best performance like that was just slapping this thing in the manual mode and just loving those manual shifts on this CVT it's a it's a real gym ok pricing a juke is pretty straightforward start with the bass on an S twenty thousand seven fifty and then blow right by that at about four grand and go all the way to an SL don't fiddle around in the middle of options or the sv trim that we have here go to the top it's the best value you get the navigation system upgraded audio the rockford fosgate deal the icon display the changes buttons leather interior keyless whole bunch of great stuff moonroof as well and then I would go with the CVT in this car I think it's the right transmission you get the perfect combination of efficiency and performance I would skip the all-wheel drive it sounds really cool but 2150 on a car like this is a very steep extra