Nissan Juke looks to VW TSI

Like many people, our jaws dropped, and we scratched our head in disbelieve when Nissan revealed the Juke crossover. Then again, what do we bloggers / arm-chair critics / so-called industry watchers know about car design? More than 5 years ago, critics spelled doom and gloom when Chris Bangle unveiled the flame surfaced E60 5-series and duck-tailed E65 7-series. The market responded by providing BMW with the best ever recorded sales and Bangle shut up his critics for good. It was the same when Marcello Gandini’s unveiled his Lamborghini Countach concept 3 decades ago. And that car soon became the defacto poster of every 8-year old's bedroom. Good design is supposed to make you sit up and take notice, though not always in a comfortable manner. Plus, Shiro Nakamura, Senior Vice President for Design and Chief Creative Officer at Nissan is known to be quite a bit of a maverick amongst car design circles. And I am glad that such a counter-culture personality can thrive at the Japanese arm of the Renault-Nissan alliance.

So lesson learnt, and this time around we shall hold back our criticisms and not discuss too much on the subjective topic of the Juke's design, but rather its oily bits. Soon after the Juke was revealed, Hiromichi Matsui the chief vehicle engineer revealed that the Juke's 1.6-litre GTDi engine is benchmarked against VW's TSI.

“We looked at Volkswagen’s TSI technology – which is now becoming very popular and I think we’re developed an engine here that’s very competitive to the TSI,”

I believe this is probably the first mainstream example of a "down-sized" Japanese engine. Previous examples of Japanese forced inducted IC engines were mainly built to boost power output, not exactly to meet rigid exhaust emission and fuel economy standards. As such, areas like a smooth transient power delivery and low speed torque, broad spread of power range are far from exemplary. A "downsized" engine's objective is not just to boost power but also to maintain exhaust emission, fuel economy and usability of a small capacity engine. It's not the usual ricer's / Car Beng's job of bolting on force induction parts.

In the 1.6-litre gasoline turbo guise, the Juke's engine produces 190PS and 240Nm of torque, assisted by an army of fancy bits including a single turbo, intercooler, direct injection and variable valve timing, plus diamond-like carbon coatings for the valve lifters and mirror finish camshafts to reduce internal friction / pumping losses. Nissan likens the 1.6-litre petrol turbo unit's power delivery to that of a normally aspirated 2.5-litre gasoline unit.

Japanese car manufacturer's are generally less keen on downsizing trend, prefering to opt for micro-hybrids, an area which the Japanese are traditionally stronger. Also, forced inductions will of course exert greater stress on engine internals and conservative Japanese car companies are understandably concerned on this. But micro-hybrids cost significantly higher and providing seamless flow between IC engine on-off power periods is still a great challenge and is particularly problematic on automatic transmissions.


The Juke was created at Nissan Design Europe (NDE) in London, and refined at Nissan’s Design Centre (NDC) in Japan. Production will begin next year at Nissan’s factory in Sunderland, England and in Oppama, Japan.

In an related news, the next Nissan model to feature a downsized engine is the next generation Micra / March, which is rumoured to feature a super-charged 1.2-litre gasoline engine. All will be revealead in the coming Geneva Motor Show.