This is really a tale of two completely different cars. On the one side you have an unapologetically cheap crossover and on the other: a full size SUV trying desperately to masquerade as a luxury vehicle without offering any, you know... luxury. If you saw my other thread you might think I hated my GMC Acadia based on a video I may or may not have made...
The truth is, I didn't hate the Acadia. In fact, I thought it was quiet, relatively smooth, comfortable and had a surprisingly compliant ride. It comes pretty well equipped even in base trim and at just a hair over $30,000, I can see why GM sells a ton of these. This is a great minivan alternative.
The Good
It's good looking.
The ride on the Acadia is great. It's smooth and imperfections in the pavement don't seem to upset the chassis all too much. Assuming nobody is buying an Acadia as a performance SUV it stands to reason that they want it to be as comfortable as possible and it delivers with an isolated (if disconnected) ride.
The good looks don't stop at the sheetmetal though. The interior looks nice as well. GM has kind of come a long way here. In other ways they're as bad as ever but for the most part, this is a good interior.
Stereo - Bose is generally a hit and miss. Auto manufacturers license it and apply their own budget to the system which means you can get a Bose branded system that ranges from utter crap (1998 Grand Prix) to actually quite nice (2011+ Audi A8) and everything in between. The Acadia's Bose system was somewhere near the top, certainly closer to the Audi than the Grand Prix. Bass response was solid in the mids where so many systems suffer and it didn't fall apart with more volume. This was a surprising plus.
The Bad
GM doesn't know luxury or if they do, they think that their customers are too stupid to know which is worse. It's a slap in the face. First there's the splitting hairs. Like that fake leather stitching. That's really in right now. It looks nice. I get why companies do it. Truly high end cars have real leather wrapped dashboards with leather stitching and this is a way to set your otherwise plebeian car apart from the rest. The problem is in the execution. In most cases the stitching follows a pattern that would suggest one panel or part of the dash is stitched. The Acadia, not so much. The injection molded stitching starts towards the windshield, wraps around over the instrument cluster and then stops; it just stops. There's no rhyme or reason. It just ends.
Pretty much every other luxury appointment is horrible. The wood is obviously plastic, they have hard touch surfaces pretty much everywhere they think they can get away with it and they not only over-use chrome, but also manage to make it looks cheaper than it is. Like when you got a cheap Chinese toy with chrome plastic when you were a kid. It just looked cheap. This is no different. Soft touch is still a concept GM and Chrysler haven't figured out either. It's as if they heard the term, had no concept of what it meant and then jammed a 1/4" of padding behind every panel. It feels better than rock hard plastic they used to use but still manages to feel cheap. Sit in a BMW, even a 3 series. Touch the door panel. It's not hard but it's not this overly padded material. It's hard with a soft touch and maybe a 16th of an inch of give and yet it feels solid and well built because it is. It's not garbage covered with a bunch of padding.
Then there's the inexcusable stuff like switchgear fitment. Look in the video above. It isn't an exaggeration. The headlight switch and the other switches next to it were basically completely loose in the dashboard. You could freely knock it around with your hand and it made noises over bumps. The same goes with pretty much all of the car's switchgear. It all just felt cheap and poorly fitted. This is a vehicle that falls apart in the details.
But the worst... The worst was the touch controls. I just don't understand how these are a thing. They don't work. I mean they simply do not work. And yet despite this, companies keep trying to incorporate touch controls. To actually get the touch controls to work you needed to press them hard, harder than you'd press an actual button. And for that effort you'd get neither the satisfaction of feeling the tactile feedback of a real button or the satisfaction of the button actually doing anything. Borderline infuriating is the fact that these touch icons were separated by small chrome strips that looked like actual buttons.
Overall though, if you can get by the weaknesses and you understand that there's nothing luxurious about the Acadia, even in high end trims, it's a good vehicle. I could see owning one of these. I wouldn't look for excuses to go out for a drive like I might in a more exciting SUV but I also wouldn't dread climbing into it. That's not exactly high praise but most people shopping for vehicles like this aren't really looking for driving excitement either.
And then there was the Rogue
The Rogue was horrible. To be fair, I was saddled with a 2013 which is the last generation but wow, this was a tragically bad vehicle with one huge exception: It's interior, though clearly lower rent in design, was loads better than the upscale Acadia's.
How so? Well the door panels were all pretty much hard plastics but they didn't feel cheap. They were substantial. The switchgear was all tightly fitted and pleasing to use with satisfying clicks. The instrument panel wasn't trying to be as impressive as the Acadia's and looked much better despite clearly being cheaper. Even the doors closed with an impressively solid thud not unlike our FX35 whereas the Acadia's door closed with a less satisfying rattle of some sort of interior component.
And this is a lesson for the few here that say I'm constantly hating on domestics and swinging from ze Germans. This isn't a German car. It's an unapologetically cheap crossover that gets all the same details the Acadia gets wrong, right. Unfortunately for the Rogue it's all pretty much downhill from there.
The Bad
Remember for a time Geo made a Metro convertible with a 3 cylinder engine that put out something like 55hp? Imagine how rough a 55hp, 3 cylinder engine must run. You're talking levels of noise, vibration and harshness on par with a poorly running lawnmower.
And yet, the Rogue is worse than that. The engine sputters to life with an audible upper valve train tick that never fully goes away and yet I suspect isn't an indication of a problem with the engine so much as a product of Nissan not giving any fucks. It sounds bad. It sounds rough. It sounds loud. And if Nissan hasn't scared you away with this trifecta of sadness, allow the CVT transmission to gently caress the final few nails into the lid of the Rogue's coffin. Is there anything that conspires to completely ruin a driving experience more than a CVT transmission? If there is I'd love to know. It's as if on the list of powertrain requirements some junior engineer doodled something along the lines of "The transmission should always feel like it's slipping. That would be a funny joke!". Only he spilled some coffee on the part about it being a joke. It's truly horrible.
And the car's unapologetic cheapness, combined with it's anemic drivetrain wouldn't be so bad if it carried a price tag that reflected it's feature-list but it started for over $20,000. $20,000! You know what else you can get for a bit over $20,000? The Ford Escape: a vehicle that by comparison feels like a Maybach.
The Rogue, at least in the iteration that I drove, is a vehicle to be avoided by everyone. It gives up everything and saves you nothing. Go find a car buying website. [MENTION=12]Bru[/MENTION] seems to like cars.com so why not that... Find the Crossover section, wrap a blindfold around your head and then point. Whatever you happen to pick will be better than the Rogue unless of course you're unlucky enough to have picked the Rogue.
The cliffs? The Rogue is wretched. Don't do it. The GM is nice but GM still hasn't learned how to build an interior and their faux luxury makes an otherwise ok interior feel cheap.
The truth is, I didn't hate the Acadia. In fact, I thought it was quiet, relatively smooth, comfortable and had a surprisingly compliant ride. It comes pretty well equipped even in base trim and at just a hair over $30,000, I can see why GM sells a ton of these. This is a great minivan alternative.
The Good
It's good looking.
The ride on the Acadia is great. It's smooth and imperfections in the pavement don't seem to upset the chassis all too much. Assuming nobody is buying an Acadia as a performance SUV it stands to reason that they want it to be as comfortable as possible and it delivers with an isolated (if disconnected) ride.
The good looks don't stop at the sheetmetal though. The interior looks nice as well. GM has kind of come a long way here. In other ways they're as bad as ever but for the most part, this is a good interior.
Stereo - Bose is generally a hit and miss. Auto manufacturers license it and apply their own budget to the system which means you can get a Bose branded system that ranges from utter crap (1998 Grand Prix) to actually quite nice (2011+ Audi A8) and everything in between. The Acadia's Bose system was somewhere near the top, certainly closer to the Audi than the Grand Prix. Bass response was solid in the mids where so many systems suffer and it didn't fall apart with more volume. This was a surprising plus.
The Bad
GM doesn't know luxury or if they do, they think that their customers are too stupid to know which is worse. It's a slap in the face. First there's the splitting hairs. Like that fake leather stitching. That's really in right now. It looks nice. I get why companies do it. Truly high end cars have real leather wrapped dashboards with leather stitching and this is a way to set your otherwise plebeian car apart from the rest. The problem is in the execution. In most cases the stitching follows a pattern that would suggest one panel or part of the dash is stitched. The Acadia, not so much. The injection molded stitching starts towards the windshield, wraps around over the instrument cluster and then stops; it just stops. There's no rhyme or reason. It just ends.
Pretty much every other luxury appointment is horrible. The wood is obviously plastic, they have hard touch surfaces pretty much everywhere they think they can get away with it and they not only over-use chrome, but also manage to make it looks cheaper than it is. Like when you got a cheap Chinese toy with chrome plastic when you were a kid. It just looked cheap. This is no different. Soft touch is still a concept GM and Chrysler haven't figured out either. It's as if they heard the term, had no concept of what it meant and then jammed a 1/4" of padding behind every panel. It feels better than rock hard plastic they used to use but still manages to feel cheap. Sit in a BMW, even a 3 series. Touch the door panel. It's not hard but it's not this overly padded material. It's hard with a soft touch and maybe a 16th of an inch of give and yet it feels solid and well built because it is. It's not garbage covered with a bunch of padding.
Then there's the inexcusable stuff like switchgear fitment. Look in the video above. It isn't an exaggeration. The headlight switch and the other switches next to it were basically completely loose in the dashboard. You could freely knock it around with your hand and it made noises over bumps. The same goes with pretty much all of the car's switchgear. It all just felt cheap and poorly fitted. This is a vehicle that falls apart in the details.
But the worst... The worst was the touch controls. I just don't understand how these are a thing. They don't work. I mean they simply do not work. And yet despite this, companies keep trying to incorporate touch controls. To actually get the touch controls to work you needed to press them hard, harder than you'd press an actual button. And for that effort you'd get neither the satisfaction of feeling the tactile feedback of a real button or the satisfaction of the button actually doing anything. Borderline infuriating is the fact that these touch icons were separated by small chrome strips that looked like actual buttons.
Overall though, if you can get by the weaknesses and you understand that there's nothing luxurious about the Acadia, even in high end trims, it's a good vehicle. I could see owning one of these. I wouldn't look for excuses to go out for a drive like I might in a more exciting SUV but I also wouldn't dread climbing into it. That's not exactly high praise but most people shopping for vehicles like this aren't really looking for driving excitement either.
And then there was the Rogue
The Rogue was horrible. To be fair, I was saddled with a 2013 which is the last generation but wow, this was a tragically bad vehicle with one huge exception: It's interior, though clearly lower rent in design, was loads better than the upscale Acadia's.
How so? Well the door panels were all pretty much hard plastics but they didn't feel cheap. They were substantial. The switchgear was all tightly fitted and pleasing to use with satisfying clicks. The instrument panel wasn't trying to be as impressive as the Acadia's and looked much better despite clearly being cheaper. Even the doors closed with an impressively solid thud not unlike our FX35 whereas the Acadia's door closed with a less satisfying rattle of some sort of interior component.
And this is a lesson for the few here that say I'm constantly hating on domestics and swinging from ze Germans. This isn't a German car. It's an unapologetically cheap crossover that gets all the same details the Acadia gets wrong, right. Unfortunately for the Rogue it's all pretty much downhill from there.
The Bad
Remember for a time Geo made a Metro convertible with a 3 cylinder engine that put out something like 55hp? Imagine how rough a 55hp, 3 cylinder engine must run. You're talking levels of noise, vibration and harshness on par with a poorly running lawnmower.
And yet, the Rogue is worse than that. The engine sputters to life with an audible upper valve train tick that never fully goes away and yet I suspect isn't an indication of a problem with the engine so much as a product of Nissan not giving any fucks. It sounds bad. It sounds rough. It sounds loud. And if Nissan hasn't scared you away with this trifecta of sadness, allow the CVT transmission to gently caress the final few nails into the lid of the Rogue's coffin. Is there anything that conspires to completely ruin a driving experience more than a CVT transmission? If there is I'd love to know. It's as if on the list of powertrain requirements some junior engineer doodled something along the lines of "The transmission should always feel like it's slipping. That would be a funny joke!". Only he spilled some coffee on the part about it being a joke. It's truly horrible.
And the car's unapologetic cheapness, combined with it's anemic drivetrain wouldn't be so bad if it carried a price tag that reflected it's feature-list but it started for over $20,000. $20,000! You know what else you can get for a bit over $20,000? The Ford Escape: a vehicle that by comparison feels like a Maybach.
The Rogue, at least in the iteration that I drove, is a vehicle to be avoided by everyone. It gives up everything and saves you nothing. Go find a car buying website. [MENTION=12]Bru[/MENTION] seems to like cars.com so why not that... Find the Crossover section, wrap a blindfold around your head and then point. Whatever you happen to pick will be better than the Rogue unless of course you're unlucky enough to have picked the Rogue.
The cliffs? The Rogue is wretched. Don't do it. The GM is nice but GM still hasn't learned how to build an interior and their faux luxury makes an otherwise ok interior feel cheap.