We asked leading car writers to pick their favorite car from the past 10 years. Matt eats a humble pie and chooses the car that changed the compact hatch market.
“Maybe you need to buy in concept. I'm afraid I'm not." Not my words, Carol, the words of the BBC Top-Ge… Oh, wait. No, actually, these are my words.
In 2007 I wrote to them about the new Nissan Qashqai, a car that was, in my opinion, basically a taller version of the regular hatchback, not bad but nothing special, and that Nissan was launched because its Almera hatch could never get close to Ford Focus, Opel Astra or Volkswagen Golf sales levels.
In this kind of length, but taller and with a higher price, though, Qashqai, may result Nissan on something. I'm not so convinced. He felt a little cynical. I dare say, a little pointless - a tall car that did not do off-road. It didn't do much for me and I don't think it does much for the benefit of the motorists.
Shows that I know because I couldn't be more wrong. She changed the market.
You could make an argument that the Qashqai was a 2000-2010 car. Even the car of the millennium is still the car that rewrote what the hatchback family looks like. Before Qashqai, there were hatchbacks. After that, everyone had to have a C or D-segment SUV or crossover.
Luckily, it's not like the good people at Nissan, without fail, remind me of my original take on this one, at length, every time they see me, which most recently was when they launched the new Juke.
Because if the Qashqai is the car that changed the big hatch family, I promoted the Juke as my car this decade, not because I love it, but because it made the compact hatchback that the Qashqai made the big hatchback. If you're going to be able to change what buyers want, I think you're looking at the most important ship launched in the last 10 years.
The Juke arrived in 2010 with its odd headlights, making it a compact crossover that looked like nothing else, but once it hit the list of the country's best-selling cars, it just stayed there. And then competing manufacturers introduced similar cars and they outsold regular hatchbacks too.
Having been replaced this fall, a few months before the end of the decade, the Juke has more life than traditional cars usually have, too. Most recently at a new car launch – where Nissan very kindly doesn't remind me again how wrong I am about the Qashqai – the old jukebox still played well enough that in 2018 it was the UK's 21st best-selling car.
Nissan stretched the MKI beyond all normal standards, but it still outperformed its competitors, which now number loads. And even now that Nissan has brought the second generation of the compact SUV to market, some car makers are still pulling on the strings of their first.
So at least it wasn't just me who didn't see it coming.
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