Ugly doesn't even begin to cover it. I'd rather have to look at Yoko Ono every day.

But when all was said and done, it rose to the top of the spreadsheet on purely technical grounds. AWD w/ torque-vectoring, heated seats, not a Suzuki SX4, and small.

And it really is amazingly un-large as compared to every other AWD vehicle I looked at. And it's funny how so many of the negative reviews I read on this car centered entirely on "It's tiny" and "the cargo space is too small" and "it can't carry nearly as much as a RAV4..."

And I'm just thinking... That's the whole point, folks. It's possible for an AWD vehicle to not be large.

This may be my favorite review so far:Yes. Yes it is.


So, I'm a Datsun owner now. That was the first car which my father bought after coming to the US.

 

I am going to assume that it will sit in the garage most of the year with a battery tender attached.

You made up for the uglyness with the kitten pic.

 

https://www.facebook.com/BabayagaRS/videos/476171964157469/

 

I think the battery tender may wind up moving between the two on a seasonal basis.

We get about six months of not-winter here, when it actually makes sense to be driving the NB. I've been stubbornly resisting it for years, but having a solid roof over your head (and heated seats) is actually pretty nice when it's 20°F, snow or no snow.

Something I wasn't expecting is that I find the Juke a somewhat less comfortable place to sit in. It's not that the ergonomics are terrible by any stretch, merely that I'm so accustomed to wearing the car like a glove, whereas with the Datsun, there's a lot of free space around you. I feel... unsupported, maybe is the right word?

Ah, whatever...

 

 

Fell out the ugly tree. Hit every branch.

 

Have you....uhhhh.....found that the Miata hood is too long for you to gauge the turning radius?

 

Parking is a different concept in Chicago than in San Marcos. The Miata fits into spaces that other folks don't recognize as being a space.

Here's a photo you won't likely find anywhere else:



Neither car moved between those two frames.

This ugly-*** bitch is barely longer than an NB, but has double the ground clearance and double the driven-wheels.

Feel free to continue to mock me. If you'd like, you can drive up here to Chicago in a Catfish and do it in person, just after one of our customary 12+ inch snow drops.

 

Having lived in the mouth of Little Cottonwood Canyon in Utah (home to Snowbird and Alta ski resort), I've lived my share of DEEP snow winters. I drove downtown to work or school nearly every day. My "snow" cars were FWD, not AWD. I also understand that--in your case--necessity is an ugly, UGLY mother.

 

Another big plus is that it’s extremely unlikely that it will be stolen while you’re at work.

 

It is an ugly ************.

Ground clearance is really the biggest issue for me. We tend to get overnight dumps of a foot or more, and now that I live in the northside where the plows don't go, the NB was just body-surfing up into the drifts. It was embarrassing to not be able to get into work, despite the facts that:

A: I am the boss, and

B: I live much closer to work than any of my employees.


So, this just had to change. The rest of the folks who work in my department live in the 'burbs, so they have plow service where they live, and then drive only major roads & highways to get to work. Meanwhile, I'm within "Alan Shephard clumsily hitting a golf ball on the moon" distance from the TV station, and yet I couldn't manage to get the eighth-mile from my house out to Addison Street, at which point the roads were clear.

Yes, I walked it a couple of times. Walking two miles through not only a foot of snow but also the extra **** that the plows pushed off the road onto the sidewalks... sucks.

It was worth the money not to have to do that any longer.

 

 

 

Here's an annoying piece of design:



There are two main user-facing computer displays in the center of the dash. The upper hosts the radio / satnav / phone / etc functions, and the lower hosts the climate controls, drive mode selector, and trip computer.

Both have a clock function.

The upper one sets itself automatically based on GPS. This can be overridden and manually set, but I left it in the default position.

You might think that since they're on the same network, the lower computer might inherit its clock setting from the upper. Nope, you have to set it manually.

 

I think Crockett and Tubbs picked that color scheme...

 

https://www.facebook.com/WPTV5/videos/392175466045632/

 

 

 

Joe, you know this place better than anyone. You will be getting **** over your choice of daily for some time. At least no one calls it a hair-dresser's car.