THE Dodge Nitro, according to a friend who is looking to replace his Range Rover with yet another big SUV, looks like it has just been punched in the face.
It steers, according to his pal – whose
other car is a 60-ft canal boat – like, well, a canal boat and it rides, according to my youngest, like a bouncy castle.
Yet the latest mid-range SUV from the Chrysler/Dodge stable ended up with a lot of fans in our house after doing sterling service in our annual visit-the-family Christmas round-up which, tradition demands, begins after lunch in the car park of the Champany Inn.
It swallowed five adults and a lot of luggage with loads of body and leg room in both front and rear, yet achieved getting on for 40mpg, which is not bad considering that the vast majority of its miles were covered while cruising at the motorway limit.
This is particularly commendable given the lack of aerodynamic friendliness in the petted lip, front end and the huge, truck-like radiator grille.
Oh, and it was also an automatic though my son, who like to play around with the manual shifter, could only find four of the claimed five speeds.
I reckon it is academic because no-one is going to specify the automatic gearbox over the standard six-speed manual unless they absolutely have to.
Similarly, no-one in their right mind will want the 3.7-litre petrol option which, given the way that fuel prices are soaring, may soon be too thirsty even for its native American market.
The test car was the flagship SXT Auto, complete with the diesel engine linked to the automatic transmission.
With a sticker price of £23,995, it came equipped with just about everything you could ever want as standard except, bizarrely in this day and age on a top-of-the range model, a satellite navigation system.
Yes, I know I am one of the biggest critics of expensive, integrated sat-navs, but with a price tag that's a whopping £5,000 grand over the entry-level diesel model, I would have expected much more than leather upholstery and bigger alloys for my money.
Mind you, those big, shiny 20-in alloys really set the car off and, were I buying, I would invest a couple of hours hunting down the best deal I could find on them.
You will also need to invest another hour or so reading the car's manual to find out how to operate things as mundane as the presets on the standard CD radio stereo.
In every other car I have tried, you simply tune it to the station then press and hold the preset until a beep tells you that it's fixed in the system's memory. With the Nitro, I had to set them on every journey.
It was the same story with the electric seat heaters, which had to be switched on at the start of every journey.
Like many Scots, I like to switch these on when the clocks go back and switch them off when they go forward. Still, as the entry-level model with bottom-friendly cloth trim is the no-brain choice, the seat heater switches are purely academic.
Though Dodge claim that you can get to 60mph from rest in just over 11 seconds in the manual diesel, the automatic feels and sounds a lot slower, needing more than 14 seconds for this benchmark.
With a claimed top speed of 114 mph, it is also slower than the petrol-powered version with its claimed two-miles-a-minute capability.
However, I would be wary of doing much more than the UK legal limit when on the autobahn and not just because of its potentially tragic effect on fuel economy.
The problem with the steering is not so much about accuracy as the lack of feel, especially around the straight-ahead position which means you have to readjust your style until you get used to it.
Even more scary, though, is the roly-poly handling, which suggests that you really wouldn't want to attempt a drastic change of direction in emergency conditions.
One of the things I like to try on every car I test is a slalom test involving half a dozen changes of direction in rapid succession on a stretch of road – as though steering around a number of obstructions.
However, somewhere between the first and second change of direction with the Dodge Nitro, I decided that I wanted to see 2008.
The full article contains 768 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
