The quirkiness and sense of fun of the original Juke’s interior design was toned down a little for the Mk2 version and it was augmented by a pretty clear effort to add some richer material and technological allure. There’s still plenty of visual character and a bit of fun factor in evidence, though.
While the design flair hasn’t been allowed to take over, or to prevent the Juke from delivering passenger space or ambient perceived quality to make it competitive with its rivals, there are still plenty of curved, bulbous surfaces distributed throughout the cabin. That’s quite a contrast to the flat-faced Skoda Kamiq and the drab Vauxhall Crossland.
You sit high and slightly bent-legged at the controls, with better visibility of the world outside than you get in a traditional hatchback like the Clio.
Originally, the instruments were analogue dials, but for the second-generation model they’re replaced by a 12.3in digital info display – bringing it into line with key class rivals. It’s a relatively sharp screen and you can customise the display somewhat, with different dials, the option to show mapping, and easy access to efficiency figures.
On the pre-facelift model, we felt that Nissan’s use of leather and chromed plastic smacked of a moderately successful attempt to lift the Juke’s ambience upmarket. There have been a few more efforts this time: the leather options have been removed, replaced with an upmarket PVC, but some trims such as our N-Sport test car get neat seat stitching – in yellow, to match the exterior paint of our test car.
There’s also a slightly reworked dashboard design, which features a large swathe of partly recycled Alcantara trim. On our test car, it was yellow but more demure colours are available. In fact, you can only order the yellow with certain exterior colours – it doesn’t match the blue or red exterior, for example.
What is impressive is how much extra space has been found inside the car relative to what was a pretty impractical showing previously. For the 2024 facelift, Nissan has even expanded the size of the glovebox to 6.6 litres – good news if you have lots of gloves.
The central armrest has also been redesigned, and there’s now an electric handbrake. The e-pedal and EV mode buttons have also been moved on the hybrid.
Although the Juke isn’t the best-packaged or most accommodating car in its class, it no longer gets the wooden spoon for second-row occupant room or for boot space. Taller adults can sit line astern now pretty comfortably, whereas they wouldn’t have had a hope of doing so before.
The car’s 422-litre boot is respectable for capacity, too – up 20% for volume on the last car, better than the Ford Puma (401 litres, discounting its underfloor Megabox) and equal to the Renault Captur (422 litres) and made accessible by an adjustable-level floor.
The hybrid loses 68 litres of space, owing to the placement of its 1.2kWh drive battery, but it’s still larger than that of the Captur E-Tech (326 litres). Rear seat space is more generous than in that car too.
Nissan Juke multimedia
For the pre-facelift models, cars in Acenta and above grades featured an 8.0in infotainment touchscreen, which was fine – but rivals were beginning to offer bigger and better versions. So from the 2024 update onwards, Acenta grades and up feature a sharper 12.3in TFT screen, which is horizontally mounted and reminiscent of the one in the Nissan Ariya EV.
It’s gently tilted towards the driver for easy access and is decently sharp at 1920 by 720 pixels. It’s also customisable so you can preset your favourite options. It includes smartphone mirroring for both Apple and Android phones, as well as NissanConnect live information services, and a rear-view camera. There’s a built in sat-nav and it also offers voice recognition.
With a sharper screen, Nissan has upgraded the resolution of the rear-view camera from 0.3 to 1.3 megapixels, which will be a boon if you sometimes find parking difficult.