It's Good to be Qing: Nissan Qashqai Road Test Review

Normal people love 'em. They give all the benefits of an off-roader - headroom, driving position - but without the pointless heavy 4WD system, and because they're built on car platforms they're the same size as a car so you can fit them in your garage.

There's now something like 23 cars in the C-Crossover sector alone, and they account for a quarter of all European sales.

 

https://www.gtplanet.net/tag/road-test-review/
https://www.gtplanet.net/tag/first-drives/

 

Heh, we are planning some features, and certainly there's scope for vs. pieces like that. It's a little tricky for me to get two different press cars in at once for a couple of reasons (it's not fair on other minor outlets like us, and I don't have much room to keep them! That said, the snow last week meant I briefly had three in at once due to rescheduled pick ups and collections).

It'll be a little bit of a build up to that, because even though I already have a decent relationship with most press offices, they need to see the value in sending GTPlanet some cars. Hopefully we can get some US press offices involved too and do transatlantic twin tests

That's sort of why I'm back here full time. I've been doing articles, tests and reviews for carwow, CarThrottle and, via a media agency I've been working for since September 2015, the Press Association, AOL cars, Yahoo, AA Cars, Motors.co.uk (you can find video reviews with me, if you try really hard and can put up with my voice) and a couple of B2B magazines.

We've been reviewing vehicles here since... I think June or July last year, but we had a little hiatus over Christmas. We've been trying to get a format that's comprehensive but easy to read, has our own character but not to the point of parody, is fair without being brutal or gushing, and which is easy to write when out of the office.

We'll always take suggestions on how to improve the format, but I've sort of settled on six images each time to break up the text into 300-450 word chunks - basically a screen's height on a 1920x1080 monitor. They comprise a beauty shot as a header, front and rear angles, a detail shot (interesting detail, or badge/logo) and an engine-bay shot, plus an overall image for the thumbnail.

 

I wouldn't worry, it's been a process. I didn't realise there'd been that many either; I know I'd done a fair few, but I didn't think it'd be 20-odd already!

I've been away doing car things in other places, but we've been talking about doing car things for here too for a good while. Everything just sort of lined up at once - the site redesign, my suddenly becoming unbusy - and we've been slowly managing automotive topics into the mix, initially at a couple a week. I think the first review was in June 2017 and we'd been steadily doing one a week up until the Christmas break. We had a little pause and reassessed the automotive stuff a little more broadly; our Geneva coverage seemed to resonate and it seemed sensible to ride that crest. We've had a few comments on various platforms from people wondering why we've reviewed the Qashqai and not other cars (usually more GT-ish, or at least sports cars), simply because they've not been aware until now that we have

Well... it's a US site @Jordan's site, so his rules; his color, armor, honor, trunk and hood. I get my own way on some of the units though - and we put in imperial, US imperial, metric and SI where possible to cater for everyone, everywhere.