Gadgetory

the rogue is Nissan's best-selling non car by a country mile the backbone of their crossover and SUV business let's find out why and check the tech quick refresher course on where the rogue sits in the Nissan lineup it's the second smallest of their crossovers the smallest being the Juke with the crazy frog eyes this one has more of a conventional look it's still on its first generation but on the market since 2008 it's a 2 row crossover on a car based platform now let's get inside now the first thing you notice when you get into 2013 rogue SV what is that oh it's a navigation system isn't that cute I thought it was a bug when I first got in five inch LCD touchscreen but in spite of its small size which does make it hard to get a lot of detail on there they've done a good job of getting touchscreen buttons on there here's the map mode for example when you hit menu look how nice and big those buttons are of course it obliterates the map at the time that you're doing input but at least they give you a good finger landing space same thing goes for entering a destination look how fast this goes this is pretty good stuff now you get a little bit of a delay when it's reading intensively from the SD card that's where the navigation system lives but don't be fooled this isn't like a forward system where you can decide to get the SD card or not it all comes in the package with this navigation head unit so why they even expose that thing I don't know it's just really for updates later but it'd be nice to see that thing hidden because some kids going to play with it and lose it or stick it in their nose you know and once you do zoom in on something or start getting navigation guidance it optimizes the screen pretty well to show you just what you want but I can't get past the claustrophobic feeling of that little dinky display that Bluetooth system by the way is only for hands-free calling you don't have that streaming among your audio options which are am/fm no HD radio Sat radio as well three months included that's also when your traffic for the nav rig comes from I have an iPod USB connector in here as well which will take thumb drives or any Apple device here's your menu for the iPod it's clean and sim response is pretty quick and I appreciate the large typeface which does wonders when you're driving I want to grok something quickly and get your eyes back on the road now we've got a rear-view camera it also comes in our SLE package it comes in other lower trim rogues as well but not standard now you can see I'm looking at the back and I'm also looking out of a mirror camera which should tip you off that we have something else here that we have an around view monitor front back and mirror cam stitched together in a Nissan Infiniti Manor to show me a bird's-eye view of my own car the only problem is the resolutions crap and here's where that small screen really starts to punish me that's not a useful overview I'm sorry it's just too much real estate in too small a piece of real estate the transmission on this car is one choice only across all rogues and that is Nissan's CVT continuously variable transmission there's no shifting gate there are no cogs that's why no paddles either we're going to check this one out on the road in just a few moments but let's go see what puts power into it now all rogues have the same motor a two and a half litre side saddle four with no particularly novel technology in there but it's a good old durable Nissan mill from who knows how long ago you're going to get 170 horsepower 175 foot-pounds of torque out of this vehicle so it's clearly tuned for grunt and not maximum speed which makes sense in a vehicle like this it has to get through the air with kind of a biggest profile front wheel drive what we have here all wheel drives available as well still the same gearbox no matter what you do your zero to 60 on the front wheel drives about eight and a half seconds those beam demon butt as they might say mpg 23:28 if you have front-wheel drive you drop down to 20 to 26 with all-wheel drive now the road drives like you think it would drive it's kind of small and easy and light and nothing about it is laborious pretty good visibility I always like to check that out in cars these days because it usually is crap but in this case they've carved out some rather useful rear quarter windows they give you a little more not much but a little more indication of what you're about to steer into and generally speaking the greenhouse is kind of high and flat the screen is not only small but it's also very low most car makers are pushing those up to be closer to your eyeline at least your gauge eyeline this one's not even close which is another nag I've got about it now in terms of driving this vehicle one thing that annoys me is the steering wheel it does go up and down it doesn't telescope though so it sticks out here like the end of a broom handle and that just never allowed me to get really comfortable but the biggest issue I've got is with the engine transmission relationship of this vehicle normally I like Nissan's cvts they're the only company I think that really gets them right or they don't feel vague and slippery all the time except in this car this one's starting to feel vague and slippery when you really get on it there's an awful lot of kind of wind up and what feels like slip but is really continual gear ratio evolution as you're driving it feels less like it has gears and that's not really a good thing to most drivers as a result like coming off a stop here there's kind of muted engine response and then once it does come on it comes on too late and too much kind of that rubber band a yo-yo effect it sort of mutes the engine's responsiveness and I know this is a good motor 175 foot-pounds of torque I can do a lot with that but not when it's going through a slip box so I feel like Nissan has slipped a little in their CVT engineering or programming okay let's price this 2013 rogue we have an SV which is the better base and we've added SL which is the C net tech lovers package here's how the pricing looks you're damn near $27,000 for an SV front-wheel drive adds 1300 for all-wheel drive then add a chunky 3900 for the SL package but you're going to want to do that because that's where all the goodies are for example that navigation system the rear camera and a round view monitor the Bose audio with the fancy flat panel subwoofer all kinds of heating and power leather seats all the stuff you want it's a big buy-in but you can't do much all a card on this vehicle