Nissan Juke Review

The Juke looks as distinctive on the inside as it does on the outside. Everywhere you look, there are rounded shapes and soft edges. It’s a pleasant place to spend some time and you’ll quickly get to grips with what everything does.

The entry-point Visia trim level has a small digital display in the centre of the dashboard, with some buttons beneath it. It looks basic but it’s easy to use. In its place, other Juke models have a touchscreen that’s larger and looks more stylish. Its graphics are clear and the menus are easy to navigate around and all Jukes have separate manual dials for the air con, which makes changing temperature on the move a simple process. You can connect your phone via Apple CarPlay and Android Auto to use selected apps.

Higher-spec models have a digital driver’s display, a reversing camera, a 360-degree ‘surround-view’ system and a Bose stereo.

The Juke has comfy seats with a wide range of adjustment, so you should be able to find a position that works for you. Long-distance comfort is good and the seats hold you in place when going round corners, too. 

The interior is nice and quiet on the whole, but for two things: the large door mirrors can generate wind noise at motorway speeds, while the petrol engine in hybrid models gets quite loud if you accelerate hard. 

Getting in is easy thanks to the elevated seating position, which puts the seats just below hip level. That means most people will be able to step straight in without climbing up or bending down.

Everything you use most often in the Juke’s interior feels good in your hand. The steering wheel, gear stick, door handles, buttons and knobs are finished in high-quality trim that has a softness and warmth to it. It all feels robustly made, too. There are some harder, more functional plastics dotted about, but they’re in places you’re don’t see so much.

There’s a generous amount of headroom, legroom and shoulder room in the front of the Juke, so you should be able to get comfortable however tall you are. In the back, there’s room for a six-foot-tall passenger to sit behind someone of equal height in the front. There’s a lot more space in the back than in the first-generation Juke and adults should be comfortable enough, even on longer journeys. 

While most children should have room to stretch out in the back, they might find it hard to see out of the small back windows, which also make things rather dark compared with some small SUVs. 

Interior storage amounts to door bins big enough for a drinks bottle, a small cubby hole under the front armrest, two cupholders between the front seats and a glovebox with room for a few bags of sweets.

There’s as much as 422 litres of space in the Juke’s boot. That’s usefully bigger than the boot of many other small SUVs, and quite a lot of larger cars, too. Most people will find there’s more than enough space for the things they have to regularly carry in the car, be it shopping or luggage for a weekend away.

Loading or unloading is easy thanks to the Juke’s large boot opening, although the steeply sloping back window limits what you can put it in because it restricts the boot height towards the back of the car.

Hybrid models have a smaller – but still reasonable – 354-litre boot capacity. That’s because the battery pack takes up some space underneath the boot.

The Juke has a height-adjustable boot floor that allows you to adapt the space to your needs. At the higher setting, it’s level with the back bumper, which can be helpful if you’re sliding heavier items in or out. There’s also a large space underneath, where you can store things like shopping bags, dog leads and dirty shoes.

Moving the floor down to its lower level gives you a deeper, larger space, or you can remove it altogether to gain an extra few millimetres.  The trade-off for the extra depth, of course, is that lifting things in or out could be a bit trickier due to the drop to the floor.

If you need to carry anything really big, the back seat folds down in a two-piece, 60/40 split. Doing so creates 1,305 litres of space in petrol models and 1,237 litres in hybrid models.

The Juke feels pretty good to drive. The steering is light, you have a good view out and it feels quite agile, all of which makes it a doddle to drive around and park. Out of town, you’ll notice that the front tyres grip the road well, giving you confidence around corners. On the motorway, the Juke feels reassuringly solid. 

Generally speaking, the Juke gives a smooth ride, although models with larger alloy wheels, and the hybrid models (which are heavier) can feel a bit jiggly on bumpy roads. All models have front-wheel drive. Unlike the previous-generation Juke, the range has no four-wheel-drive models.

The Juke is available with petrol or hybrid power, both of which give similar performance. They feel reasonably sprightly around town and cruise along the motorway at 70mph happily enough. Hybrid models accelerate a little more quickly than petrol models thanks to the boost they get from the electric motor. However, the Juke’s relatively modest power means it can feel a bit sluggish if you’ve got a full load of people and luggage.

The Juke is as fuel-efficient as any other small SUV with a comparable engine. According to official figures, average fuel economy is 47.9mpg to 48.7mpg with a petrol engine and a manual gearbox (automatic versions give about 2mpg less). With hybrid power, you’re looking at 55.4mpg to 56.5mpg. The variation is a result of the different trim levels’ wheel sizes.

Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are fairly low, ranging from 114 g/km for the most-efficient hybrid model to 140g/km for the least-efficient petrol automatic model.

Pick any Juke model and you’ll find that it generally costs a bit less than other SUVs with similar standard features and comparable performance. That makes it pretty good value overall.

Nissan has a reputation for building cars that are generally robust and dependable.

If anything does go wrong, you have back-up from the three-year or 60,000-mile (whichever comes first) warranty. That’s the norm, but you get a longer manufacturer warranty with some rival cars, including the Kia Stonic (seven years) and the Hyundai Kona (five years).

Safety organisation Euro NCAP awarded a full five-star safety rating to the Juke when it tested it in 2019. It scored high marks for protecting passengers in a crash and it’s fitted with lots of advanced driver safety features. These include automatic emergency braking, lane-departure warning, lane-keeping assist and road sign recognition. Some models also have Nissan’s ‘ProPILOT Assist Pack’, a set of extra safety features including a 360-degree camera system, a driver-attention monitor, blindspot monitoring,a rear cross-traffic alert system and adaptive cruise control.

There are five trim levels available on the Juke – Visia, Acenta, N-Connecta, Tekna and Tekna+. The further you go up the range, the more standard features you get. 

The entry-point Visia spec is pretty basic – you get air con, cruise control, Bluetooth and DAB radio but there are black exterior door handles and plastic wheel covers rather than alloy wheels. It’s worth paying a bit more for Acenta trim – the next step up – because it has alloy wheels, body-coloured door handles, a reversing camera, Apple CarPlay/Android Auto support and a touchscreen infotainment display. N-Connecta, Tekna and Tekna+ models are very well equipped for such a small car, with lots of extra luxury and design features.

You don’t get a lot of choice in engines for the Juke, which you may think is either a good thing or a bad thing – you can have a petrol engine with a manual or automatic gearbox, or the automatic-only hybrid.

The petrol engine – called 1.0 DiG-T – gives perfectly adequate performance for nipping around town and cruises easily at 70mph on the motorway. It’s fairly fuel-efficient, too.

The Juke Hybrid has a 1.6-litre petrol engine plus a battery-powered electric motor. It has 141bhp and at low speed you can drive on electricity alone most of the time. The petrol engine joins in at higher speeds. The hybrid gives very similar performance to the petrol engine’s, but it gives better mpg, according to the official figures.