Video: 2025 Nissan Rogue: Winning Through Competence

It's kinda lame to just look at something and say, "There's nothing about the vehicle we can point to and say, 'I don't know about that.'" But that's kind of what happened with the Rogue for the third time in a row. I said it's doing everything very competently and very well, and that really does show up in everything from the subjective scoring and the objective scoring as well. It looks good. It feels good. It drives well. It's comfortable. It's got technology that's easy to use. I mean, overall I liked the thing quite a lot. Yeah, there's nothing it does that's stupid and there are a lot of things it does very, very well. The interior for me was more luxurious even than the Mazda, which is making a point to be upscale and the Nissan beats it in terms of interior quality. You get that nice quilted, leather upholstery. You get really good feeling controls. Everything feels well put together. It's just very comfortable. It's also features laden. This has a ton of unique features. I think I said it was probably the most well-equipped contestant we've had in one of these comparisons in forever. It was also one of the most expensive vehicles we've had in the compact SUV test too. It was $48,330. Nearly $5,000 more than the next most expensive Tucson hybrid. Now we account for that in our value scoring. There's a price component that it got knocked down in. But with that price comes a lot of those features you were mentioning that are unique too. It had Tri-Zone climate control, rear sunshades, and also a hands-free driving system. The only one in the test that had that and that helped it get a win in our driver assist features category too. Yeah, the new ProPILOT 2.1 plus I believe it's called. Yes. Is a hands-free cruise control. That works very similarly to General Motors Super Cruise, but it's not Super Cruise. It doesn't work quite that well, but it does work reasonably well and we've all tried it at some point. And if it's something that's important to you in terms of being a commuter vehicle, then it can make highway driving a little bit less stressful. But you are gonna pay for that thing. Yeah, I believe on the price sheet it's $3,200 as an option and for me that's not a priority. So for me, I'd probably skip this option and get the Rogue's price more in line with the other competitors in the test. Yeah, $48,000 is roughly the average new car transaction price these days. So I mean, while it does feel high in terms of the overall pantheon of vehicles that we tested, it's not out of the realm of possibility for what people are paying for an average new family vehicle these days. And this one had a turbocharge three-cylinder engine. Still had decent power though, 201 horsepower, and it still got reasonable fuel economy among the gas only vehicles rated at 30.8 miles per gallon. Second in terms of the gas only vehicles and the test. It was behind the hybrids as you'd expect. Also, cargo room was pretty decent in, it wasn't the highest. It had 18.5 cubic feet, so kind of mid-pack. But again, it was doing enough to do well in all these categories, even if it wasn't a standout in everything. Yeah, that engine in particular, I think is fascinating. We were worried about it during the last test we did two years ago, switching to a turbocharged three-cylinder from the four-cylinder that it had. But it impressed us then and it impresses us now again. Despite the fact that it's only three cylinders, it's tuned in such a way that it has plenty of around town torque. I do kind of wish we saw the actual geared transmission from the Nissan Murano in this vehicle instead of the continuously variable automatic transmission. But this is not one of the bad CBTs on the market. It actually does work very well. It's reasonably smooth, not overly loud inside. In terms of powertrain, it's punchy, it's peppy, and I think it works really well. Yeah, it's a great package. And on top of that, you're not gonna get the sporty ride quality or handling of some of the vehicles here, but what you do get is just very competent ride quality. There's no complaints to be had when you're driving this around, highway or around town. It's just balanced. The entire thing just feels comfortable, balanced, competent. It doesn't embarrass itself when you get onto twisty bits. Braking feel is really good. I mean, overall it's not the sportiest, but then again, it's not a sports car. And so I think it'll do really well for a lot of families users. And it one in our vehicle user interface category. But Nissan has also introduced Google built-in in these versions of the Rogue. So I think there was some concerns we had about that system here like we've had in other vehicles. But overall, the overall user experience was still good enough to give it the overall win. Yeah, Google built-in is slowly spreading and ticking over pretty much all automotive applications that we've been testing. Sometimes it works great, sometimes it doesn't work great. We had one tester that just had incredible difficulties syncing their phone up to the actual system. And we've all experienced issues with the voice commands in Google built-in. They don't always work. And some work in some vehicles and some don't work in other vehicles. And if you don't have data connection, you also lose a lot of your controls for Google built in in terms of the voice command. So it's not a perfect solution, but it did seem to work pretty reasonably well in the Nissan. Yeah, I didn't run into any issues myself. I think the graphics are great. I'm a heavy Google Maps user when I'm driving, and I feel like Google OS really goes out of its way to make its own native navigation system look better when you're using it. So it's a positive experience. I'm worried about the continued creep of Google OS and the glitches we continue to experience from time to time, but for now here, I liked it. Comfortable finally finished and extremely well-equipped, the Nissan Rogue Platinum is the well-rounded compact SUV in our test, and that's really what makes it the winner. It delivers a premium experience, but it comes at a very premium price. To see the full results of our compact SUV comparison test, be sure to check out cars.com/news.