Nissan Murano

Kudos to Nissan’s interior design team, because the new Murano is truly a pleasant place to spend some time. We’d put it up against interiors from BMW and Lexus. There are padded surfaces, a variety of contrasting materials, and thoughtful details like accent lighting. The top-level Platinum trim has quilted seats. A Nissan representative told us the iridescent surface that spans the Murano’s dashboard is supposed to be reminiscent of the famous glass from the car’s namesake islands in Venice. Our only gripe is the shiny “piano black” material around the gear selector buttons. It’s a magnet for fingerprints and scratches, especially if you wear rings or toss your house keys into the cup holder.

Nissan claims to have stiffened up the Murano’s suspension to quell body roll, which is when a car leans to one side in a curve or turn. We think they did a good job, and we’ll see how that translates to real-world obstacle avoidance maneuvers when we put our Murano through our emergency handling tests.

The Murano’s original advantage—its slightly elevated height—remains. Because it’s not as tall as some SUVs and not as low to the ground as a sedan, the Murano has a “just right” ground clearance that many of our test drivers praised for how easy it is to get in and out of.

A few of us took multi-hour road trips in the process of putting 2,000 break-in miles on our own Murano, and we found that the driver’s seat remained supportive and comfortable even on a long journey. Drivers will find plenty of adjustments for a variety of body types, good thigh support, and just enough side bolstering to keep you in place through curves. All Muranos get heated seats. You have to step up to the SL for a heated steering wheel, and only the Platinum trim offers cooled and massaging seats with leather instead of leatherette.

The Murano does a good job isolating the cabin from road and wind noise like a more luxurious model. A few of us liked hearing the engine’s agreeable growl come through when accelerating with some verve, as it gave us a sense of how the powertrain was responding to our throttle inputs.

We often complain when automakers put form above function for infotainment and climate controls, but the Murano’s infuriating maze of poorly thought-out buttons, menus, and touchscreens is among the worst user interfaces we’ve come across. Our logbook is full of comments like, “The controls ruin the car for me,” “I couldn’t live with the controls,” and “A disaster.” Altogether, we find them confusing and distracting.

• The small central infotainment touchscreen compresses a bunch of virtual buttons into an impossibly small area. The “buttons” for the seat heaters and climate mode are smaller than a fingertip and are hard to aim at while driving on a bumpy road.
• The screen is also far away, so the driver has to lean and reach forward to make adjustments.
• Some features, such as the heated steering wheel and lane centering assistance, can be controlled both through physical buttons and on-screen menus. Others, such as adaptive cruise control, can only be controlled through the steering wheel controls.
• The flat, touch-sensitive climate controls are hard to see in direct sunlight, and more difficult to adjust quickly than dials or knobs

The steering wheel controls

• These are so user-unfriendly that they deserve special scorn.
• The control labels are very difficult to see in daylight or while wearing sunglasses.
• For some reason, the Murano can’t seem to figure out how to automatically adjust the interior display brightness on its own. If you get into the car during the day and it’s been manually set to “night” mode, good luck figuring out which button does what.
• An easy-to-hit button toggles whether the right-side steering wheel controls adjust the gauge cluster or center screen. Hit it by accident and you’ll end up changing a setting on the central navigation screen instead of the fuel economy screen behind the steering wheel, or vice versa.
• A “roller” control on the right side is installed on a diagonal. Ostensibly, it’s easier to use with your thumb, but it makes it hard to differentiate between “up” and “down.”
• The steering wheel is also quite cluttered, making it difficult to find which buttons do what. We understand Nissan’s desire to put frequently used features close at hand, but there are so many controls that the driver has to look away from the road to find the right one, which defeats the purpose.

In certain situations the engine and transmission acted like an unruly teenager, displaying unexpected bursts of energy, occasional poor judgment, and a reluctance to get out of bed. Stuck in stop-and-go traffic, we noticed that the Murano hesitated to take off from a rolling stop. The transmission occasionally failed to downshift when appropriate, which led to some odd engine sounds and awkward forward lurches. A few testers experienced an unnerving lag when trying to initiate a pass at highway speeds. Worst of all is when the fuel-saving engine stop/start system is active. Although the engine restarts quickly when you take your foot off the brake, it takes seemingly forever for the Murano to actually get going once the driver hits the gas pedal.

We’re grateful for our SL’s surround-view camera because the Murano’s rear visibility is blocked by thick pillars and tiny side windows.

Although there’s plenty of legroom, the space looks more comfortable than it actually is. The seat is low to the ground and short on under-leg support. At the same time, the seatback is upright and cannot be reclined.

The Murano has Nissan’s ProPilot Assist 1.1, which blends adaptive cruise control (ACC) and lane centering assistance (LCA) to keep the car within painted lane lines and a set distance from the vehicle in front. However, unlike more sophisticated versions of ProPilot Assist, which keep a vehicle mostly centered, the Murano often ping-ponged from left to right within the lane and left a too-small gap in traffic to stop comfortably. We’ll explore this in greater detail during our formal testing.

Unrefined “luxury” extras

The Platinum we rented was equipped with massaging front seats and a head-up display. However, the massaging seats buzzed and whirred like R2-D2 in need of WD-40, and the head-up display was so blurry that a few of our testers wondered if they needed glasses. In addition, you can’t add options à la carte. Instead, you have to step up to the SL trim for a sunroof or 10-speaker sound system, and you have to pay a premium for the Platinum to get cooled seats, heated rear seats, and rain-sensing windshield wipers.

We’ll make a final judgment after we’ve spent more time with the Murano on various roads and our test track. So far our opinions are mixed, which is further evidence of the Murano’s identity crisis. A few testers said they appreciated the level of feedback it offered to the driver, along with what they felt was an appropriate weighting of the power assist. Others wished for cushier steering more tuned for a luxury road-tripper than a sports car. The right response may come down to the driver’s expectations.

We have a variety of drivers evaluate the driving position of every car we test. So far, the Murano is drawing mixed results. Many testers complained that the steering wheel doesn’t offer enough adjustment—most wanted it to go lower, while a few wanted it to telescope out more. A few testers thought the seating position was too low, while a few others thought it was too high. If you’re considering buying a Murano, be sure to test-drive it first, and bring anyone else who might drive the car with you on the test drive.

Our Murano SL with 20-inch wheels is decent at absorbing single bumps—better than the 21-inch wheels on the Platinum we rented, in fact. However, multiple potholes or road imperfections in a row can unsettle the suspension. We noticed a choppy, bouncy sensation that shouldn’t be present on a near-luxury SUV in this price range. If you’re trading up from an older Murano, you might find the suspension to be a downgrade.

The Murano is powered by the same 2.0-liter, turbocharged four-cylinder engine found in the Infiniti QX50. Nissan says its unique “variable compression” technology is supposed to save fuel, but our tests of the QX50 found that it didn’t live up to the hype. We’ll test the Murano’s fuel economy officially, but so far it’s stayed pretty close to the EPA estimate of 23 mpg combined. There’s no hybrid version, and compared with the 34 mpg overall achieved by the Lexus RX and Santa Fe Hybrids in our testing, the Murano’s mileage isn’t so hot.

Regardless of trim, the Murano comes with Nissan Safety Shield 360, Nissan’s suite of active safety and driver assistance features, which includes automatic emergency braking with pedestrian detection, blind spot warning, rear cross traffic warning, reverse automatic emergency braking, lane departure warning, and automatic high beams.

Automatic crash notification (ACN), which uses GPS and sensors to automatically contact emergency services if an airbag deploys or if the vehicle has been in a crash, is not available on the base SV trim.

ProPilot is available in two versions—base, and 1.1. The base ProPilot, found on the SL, adds steering assistance to the adaptive cruise control system, while 1.1, found on our SL and the Platinum we rented, adds on the use of mapping data to adjust vehicle speed ahead of curves.