The quiet revolution. Nissan’s gamechanging e-Power tech is perhaps the brand’s best kept secret, but we’re letting the cat out of the bag – now that we’ve had a chance to drive one.
Nissan has had a rough time of it with its hero vehicles this year. The Qashqai and X-Trail e-Power vehicles were introduced some months back, but it’s been nigh on impossible to get hold of one to evaluate it.
Not Nissan’s fault, but it must have been so frustrating for the company to have a flagship product tied up on a boat somewhere in the Sea of Japan or holding at port while the Aussies sat on their hands determined to find some weird fruit fly or some such.
That’s water under the bridge now however and Nissan NZ has finally been able to take the wraps off its brilliant new hybrid tech for its popular SUV lines, of which the X-Trail is the biggest hero.
Don’t misunderstand, we at NZ Company Vehicle liked the Qashqai – loved it would be a better word, since this is the fleet-friendly SUV of the two. But the X-Trail is just a little more polished, having everything the fully loaded Qashqai does, but doing it just that little bit better.
This suggests the X-Trail is destined for CFO and CEO car parks in fleet-land and is more likely to be considered an old-style company vehicle perk rather than a mainstay fleet car – it’ll be a ‘selected’ vehicle for the discerning user rather than a ‘here’s the keys to your company car’ option.
This will be especially true of the e-Power models, especially as far as the X-Trail is concerned. These X-Trail’s are based on the top ‘spec Ti-L variants and accordingly, command a top-of-the-tree price.
Glad you asked. Think of e-Power as a hybrid which carries its own ability to juice itself up with all that faffing around with charge cables and Wallboxes (hey, there’s a $2k saving right there) because you don’t plug the Nissan in, anywhere or anytime.
OK, here’s the skinny: Nissan’s e-Power system comprises a petrol engine, an AC/DC inverter, two electric motors and a lithium-ion battery pack. All good so far? Excellent.
The difference here is what the petrol engine – a direct injection, turbocharged, three-cylinder 1500cc – mated to a conventional automatic BTW as opposed to a Nissan-standard CVT – unit, never gets near the wheels to drive them.
Instead, it acts as a generator feeding power through to the inverter which changes AC to DC or vice versa (hey, if any fleet manager out there can remember which goes which way, I’ll be impressed) so the energy from the engine can go and play nicely with the battery to feed the electric motors which turn the wheels.
Whew! Sounds complicated, doesn’t it? Not the ‘oh dear, out of battery power, switch over to petrol’ solution of a conventional hybrid system, but this is Nissan we are talking about, and a company which does produce some excellent engine tech. Besides, in the cutthroat world of alternative energy for vehicles, making something strikingly different does pay off.
There’s another little bit of e-innovation from Nissan too: introducing e-4orce which works hand-in-hand with e-Power.
This is an electric four-wheel control system which is effectively an ultra-advanced all-wheel-drive system for electric vehicles. According to Nissan, it makes your X-Trail faster than frog, a Venus flytrap or even a sprint runner – because you get those on the motorway everyday.
Seriously, e-4orce is all about reaction time for the vehicle to adapt to changing road conditions dry to wet, wet to snow, snow to sand, sand to mud and back to tarmac again.
A normal AWD system will take time to react which, if you are moving at say 100km/h, might be a little too late. The e-4orce system is much faster to adjust torque between the front and rear motors and their respective wheels.
The flytrap reacts in 0.3 seconds, the athlete in 0.17 seconds and the frog 0.07 seconds and e-4orce reacts in 0.0001 seconds by the way.
No matter what the surface conditions then, the X-Trail is going to give you the most tractive grip in the shortest span of time to deliver an ultra- confident driving experience.
As to the rest, the X-Trail is – as we said – a highly evolved vehicle and not just because of the technology. It has changed slightly in shape and size to accommodate the battery mostly, but the in- cabin experience is nothing short of sublime.
We were especially keen on the comfort afforded by the quilted leather seats which, to be fair, the Qashqai also has. X-Trail though, just does it slightly better. It summarise the X-Trail, I’m going to borrow from singer Carly Simon, ‘Baby, you’re the best.’
