The first addition to the only recently-launched new Primera line-up is the choice of a five-door hatchback body style to add to the existing four-door saloon and five-door estate. With the various trim and transmission options, plus the choice of 1.8 or two-litre petrol engines or the 2.2 turbo diesel, there are no fewer than 23 Primera hatches to choose from. The one tested here is roughly in the middle of the range, in terms of both specification and price.As far as I was concerned, the first impression of this car was that the rear-end styling treatment was distinctly clumsy, though it may not have been possible to do much better on a car whose basic shape does nothing to hide its considerable bulk. In more practical terms, the five-door does at least have a large and easily accessible luggage area, which Nissan reckons is sufficiently important for it to take nearly three-quarters of sales (though not on the home market - this is a Europe-only version in which the Japanese are not remotely interested).The test car had the two-litre engine which is available either with Nissan's excellent CVT transmission or, as in this case, an extraordinarily close-ratio six-speed manual. In top gear the Primera runs at only around 23mph per 1000rpm, which isn't a lot more than you would expect from fourth in a five-speed box in other, similar cars.With such tightly packed gears it's easy to keep the engine running high in the rev range - so easy, indeed, that it can happen whether or not you want it to. In the early stages of the test I felt that this couldn't possibly be helping the fuel economy, and indeed in a succession of long runs with a lot of motorway cruising I couldn't get more than about 420 miles out of a tank. That equates to about 31mpg, a long way short of the official 40.9mpg for the EC extra-urban cycle.I assume the gears have been chosen to help the car's performance. At 138bhp the engine has to fight against a lot of weight, and one way of doing that is to make sure you're at the business end of the power band as much as possible. The rev drop at each gearchange is so small that you could almost, in this respect, be driving a racing car.But that sports feel is not matched by anything else; certainly not the ride, which is ponderous, or the handling, which is sluggish. The suspension feels as though it has been set up for a different car entirely. It's almost as if the chassis engineers did their work assuming the car was going to be about the same weight as the last-generation Primera and then got a message from head office: "April Fool! We're actually making it several hundred kilos heavier than you thought we were. And there's no time to change what you've done."I think this is partly the cause of one particularly unpleasant piece of behaviour on the Primera's part. One of those long journeys involved driving along the M6 during a period of heavy crosswinds. Understandably for a car with so much side area, the Primera was significantly affected by them, but it seemed to take a long time to react to steering corrections. I found I was having to concentrate hard on keeping the thing going in the correct direction rather than paying attention to the rest of the motorway traffic. Not a restful experience.Yet in many ways the Primera is an excellent cruiser. The seats, which don't look too special, are actually very comfortable and supportive. And I was able to put the multi-adjustable steering wheel exactly where I wanted without - as so often - finding that it masked the top of the major dials on the instrument panel. The reason is that the panel is nowhere near the wheel, but mounted in the centre of the dash right up at the windscreen. It's a very sensible place to put it, requires less re-focusing as you look from the road to the instruments and back, and adds to the already considerable feeling of space inside the car.The other display is the excellent N-FORM control panel ahead of the gearlever, complete with 7" colour monitor in the SVE versions (as opposed to 6" on lesser models). That monitor shows what's behind the car when you select reverse, and it's amazing how this helps in tight parking situations.As well as the larger monitor, the SVE gets 17" alloy wheels, an uprated sound system, a Thatcham category 1 alarm and the Birdview navigation system as standard. Birdview hasn't had a particularly good press in previous CARkeys tests; the imaging is possibly the best available at present, but we've been caught out by its attempts at navigation before, and in this particular case I found that it wasn't too clever at recognising short cuts even when I asked it for the fastest route.Birdview also suffers from out-of-date information, and gives up almost entirely in remote areas, where its programmers have failed to tell it about things like nearby petrol stations, which is exactly what you need to know if you're travelling for the first time in . . . well, in remote areas.In other words, Birdview is very good on the clever stuff but notably lacking in some of the basics. And I think it's fair to apply that description to the Primera as a whole.Second opinion: There's no doubt that the fairly wacky styling will attract some people to the five-door Primera while putting others off. It's a comfortable car, with a well presented interior but rather ponderous steering and, I thought, a gearchange action which could have been de-clonked. It's true that those X-Trail instrument positions and the sweeping fascia design give the impression of plenty of front cabin space. I rather like the Birdview system's coming-in-to-land approach, and I found the mapping in one area included a newly-named national park created only the week before I was driving the car, so it's certainly bang up-to-date in some respects. Ross Finlay. Engine 1998cc, 4 cylinders Power 138bhp Transmission 6-speed manual Fuel/CO2 32.5mpg / 208g/km Acceleration 0-62mph: 9.6 seconds Top speed 124mph Price £17,500 Details correct at publication date
Our Rating
