Nissan Qashqai

The car that kickstarted the crossover craze

- Matt Robinson

AUTO Express' first drive of the Mk1 Nissan Qashqai back in January 2007 was on the whole - very positive. The car was said to have achieved its aim of slotting between the hatchback and SUV classes, while offering "the best of both worlds". But in hindsight, its arrival seems to lack fanfare. The Qashqai wasn't even the main cover car that week, and it was a similar story in other publications at the time.

Of course, we didn't know then how big a success the Qashqai might be, or the influence it'd have on the car industry. And neither did Nissan. Replacing the Almera hatchback with something very different was deemed a gamble, especially with the firm's 1999 near-bankruptcy fresh in the mind amidst the Qashqai's early development.

But the Qashqai wasn't a completely new idea. Nissan already had the Murano in its line-up, a vehicle which had proven particularly popular in the US. The Qashqai was to be a slightly shrunken take on the Murano.

Toyota, meanwhile, had laid some of the groundwork years earlier with its Mk1 RAV4, while some inspiration for Nissan's new crossover was taken from the Honda HR-V. In the end, Qashqai nailed the brief better than either car by staying much closer to the hatchback end of the spectrum in its design, but its body shape and ground clearance did enough to capture the appeal of bigger, heavier and more expensive traditional SUVs.

In the meantime, it offered more interior space than contemporary C-segment hatchbacks, despite not being a great deal larger on the outside. And although the compact MPVs that were all the rage back then went further still in terms of practicality, it didn't matter - such cars were much too dull for their own good.