2016 NISSAN Versa

Uncomfortable for long distances

Comfort Rating: 2 Performance Rating: 4 Interior Rating: 1 Safety Rating: 4 Technology Rating: 2

My existing car finally bit the dust after putting 220,000 miles on her, a 2001 Suzuki Vitara small SUV. I ended up renting the Nissan Versa from Enterprise to get me around until I can buy something to replace my Vitara. My initial impressions of the Versa were positive, it looks nice outside and I have any easy time getting into and out of the car with plenty of headroom. I am not very tall at around 5'10", but I ran into 2 problems once I sat in the driver seat. First, the center console is very low and wide, it sits forward of the shifter and the width of it hits me in my lower-right leg. This is exacerbated by the front of the driver seat which slopes upwards very steeply. The pedals are so deep in the well that I have to move the seat so far forward that I end up "man-spreading" to fit properly resulting in the leg/console collision. It makes it extremely difficult to drive long distances. My left leg also rubs against another cupholder that Nissan put in the lower part of the left door. The location of it makes no sense, no person in their right mind would ever want to place a cup or bottle there. As far as performance goes, this thing would easily wipe the floor off my old Vitara, I have no idea why people call this thing slow. Without blinking I find myself doing 50MPH and have done 65MPH with ease. Performance is right where it should be considering the price. However, I find that there is no sensation of speed or acceleration when driving this car. It is very weird, I will start accelerating, blink my eyes and find I am doing 50MPH. Whether I floor the accelerator or lightly press it, the car just starts going 50MPH with no sensation of reaching that speed. It actually makes it very difficult to drive speed limits of 30-40MPH and I constantly find myself unintentionally speeding. It must be some drive-by-wire nonsense causing this. There is no road vibration coming through either the accelerator or brake which makes things more difficult. The brakes are too responsive as well, I find it difficult to slow down over a distance, they clearly designed it to brake on a dime for idiots that don't know how to drive safely. Other gripes I have include the dash lighting, it has ridiculously bright white LED lighting that causes glare inside the car. There is a knob that was stupidly placed in the center of the dash forcing you to reach through the steering wheel to get to it and it doesn't work like a normal knob. You have to press in, turn and hold the knob to the left or right to make it adjust. If you adjust all the way left or right it wraps back around and goes back to full brightness which makes it damn near impossible to set to the lowest setting. My Vitara has the dimmer located as a dial on the left side near where the side mirror controls are which is far easier to adjust while driving. Another gripe is the air controls do not let you select outside air vs inside, it only goes to outside air when you use the defroster. Lastly, there is no 3.5MM Line-In on the front of the radio, super lame. One plus is the trunk is huge with plenty of room to fit stuff, maybe not as deep as some people would like, I put my groceries in there last night and they stayed in place all the way home. Overall my feeling is that this is a very modern car that Nissan failed to test with people of various body sizes and lacks the connection to the road that the best drivers look for in a vehicle.