Gadgetory

well look at this blue hatchback that's behind me I like to think that somebody needs honest product planning looked at the Honda Fit thought that's pretty good let's build one of our own and a couple of years later here's what you get the 2014 Nissan Versa note SL and you've got to admit that it looks a lot like the second generation Honda Fit and that's a good thing if Nissan can get it right let's hop behind the wheel of this 2014 Nissan Versa and L with the tech package and see exactly how close they get now in the cabin of the Nissan Versa the first thing you're gonna notice is that it feels really cheap and plasticky they don't really hide the cars price tag here in the dashboard the good thing about this car though is that Nissan has done a really good job with the packaging there's a lot of space in here for people and things I've got the seat adjusted for myself I'm about five nine and you can fit a six-foot-tall adult behind me with a decent amount of legroom so if you want to get people around and not take up a lot of space on the road this is a good car for that now ours is an SL model it's equipped with the SLE package and that's the trim level you're gonna want to get if you care anything about technology now this has got the larger 5.8 inch touchscreen and when I say larger I'll put that in quotes because this whole interface is gonna be dwarfed by your average iPad Mini but it's a decently sized screen you're gonna get navigation and that's gonna also come with XM Nav traffic so if you you'll be able to see traffic on the road the rear view camera that you'll get in the FL package with the tech package gets updated to Nissan's around the view camera and that's actually going to use cameras in the wing mirrors and a camera on the front to augment the rear camera to give you a view around the vehicle that's really helpful when parallel parking so that you can see how close you are to the curb and what's going on behind the vehicle you also get dynamic trajectory lines that when you turn the wheel you'll see where the vehicles gonna go on the map that makes this already small very Park able a lot more approachable you'll be able to squeeze into those tiny spots without worrying about bumping your optional 16 inch wheels on the curb or bumping into the vehicles ahead you the tech package also comes with an interesting feature that allows it to read incoming text messages now when you're on the road and you're driving you don't really get a pop-up but when your parts you get a pop-up that allows you to either read the message on-screen or ignore it when you're on the road the popup only gives you the option to read the message aloud using a text-to-speech engine so that you can see what the message is without having to look at the screen or look at your phone you can also set the system up the sim can respond to if the people while you're driving so they don't continue to bother you would follow up messages so there's the message message from m21 Goodwin hey dude let's get soft tacos later now the interface is pretty simple you've got a hardware button for most of your functions but some things are kind of hard to find on the interface and they've managed to some kind of a way meth up the volume knob this should be like a simple thing you turn one way to get your volume louder and you turn the other way to get it lower but I found that if you turn it a little too quickly it tends to like jump around a little bit so I'm only going forward and you'll see that it kind of like pops up and down like in the wrong direction every now and then so sometimes you'll be driving around and you'll want to crank up the volume a little bit and it'll just pop down to mute it's kind of weird and I don't really understand why the volume knob doesn't work like a volume not supposed to be but it's a cheap car and they probably cheaped out on the controls behind that now where the Honda Fit has its magic rear row of seats that kind of flips in all kinds of ways to get you more storage space and clearance for your things the Nissan Versa note has an interesting feature of its own at the FL trim level it's called the divide and hide floor check this out flips up comes out and it flips back right I know I'm not impressed either but it is kind of cool it gives you a couple of extra inches of vertical space it gives you a little extra storage area for hiding things like a laptop case underneath there when you're not using the car and when it's in its upper position when you fold those seats flat you get a perfectly flat storage area for long items so you don't have to worry about things getting hooked over weird inches it's a interesting feature but it's not nearly as cool as the magic seat but it's there now under the hood we've got a 1.6 liter direct-injected four-cylinder engine that's going to do about 109 horsepower and 107 pound-feet of torque and those numbers are so small that Nissan doesn't even put them on the sticker sheet that you'll get on your new Versa note now what that's gonna get you is 31 miles per gallon in the city 40 on the highway and 35 combined and I found those numbers to be pretty bang on I've been driving this thing all week in a variety of conditions and that trip computer hasn't budged from 35 miles per gallon in the entire time now the way that Nissan is gonna help you get that good highway fuel economy is with that continuously variable transmission that is aggressively tuned for efficiency and they've also got an active shutter in the front grille so when you hit highway speeds and the engine doesn't need much air flowing through the radiator it'll actually close the shutter down in the grille so that it's a little bit more aerodynamically slick now let's take a minute and hop on the road and I'll show you how it drives when it comes time to accelerate things also get a little bit wonky with the continuously variable transmission for starters you've got to have a pretty heavy foot if you want to really kind of coax this thing out of that 2 to 3,000 rpm range you kind of got to get into it lay on the pedal you want it to jump up the problem is that much like when you're cruising around town the RPMs tend to hang at that one area of the power band so you don't get the sort of going through the gear that you get in a normal car you just kind of get 5,000 rpm and it just holds there and the result just doesn't sound good it sounds a bit like an angry vacuum cleaner you don't really want to spend a lot of time with your foot on the pedal because just sounds bad of course this isn't a sports car and the point isn't performance the point is being able to get that 35 miles per gallon around town and that 40 miles per gallon on the roads from you need it now the first-generation Nissan Versa Hatchback claim to fame was that it was cheap very cheap at one point it was the cheapest new car you could buy in America now this 2014 model is a bit more expensive but it's still inexpensive this SV model is pretty close to being fully loaded at fifteen nine nine five and you're gonna add seventeen hundred dollars more to that to jump up to the SL package that's gonna get you some nice things like bigger wheels fog lights heated seats and keyless entry with push-button start now in for a penny in for a pound just go ahead and add the tech package at that point it's the only eight hundred dollars and it's gonna get you a lot of - sport tech and nice features like Bluetooth audio streaming and Pandora support if you care about listening to digital music in your car that's gonna be the one to get in our models got a couple of other options including floor mats and a cargo cover and of course destination charges to bring you to an as-tested price of nineteen fifty four or five now that's pretty close to twenty thousand dollars for a car with an interior that feels this cheap but there's a lot of space in there and it is a nice compact car with really good fuel economy that said I'm still looking twice as a competition from Honda and Hyundai