As the calendar flips into 2024, Nissan is staying the course with just a few tweaks to its midsize Murano crossover, a machine that has been on sale largely unchanged for about the last 10 years.
Soldiering into this model year, the least expensive Murano is now the front-wheel drive SV model which pastes an asking price of $37,920 on its Monroney, a sum just a couple hundred simoleons more than last year. However, the el-cheapo S trim has hit the bin, meaning the price of entry has risen by a couple of grand. We suspect the SV and SL are Murano’s volume trims anyway, so Nissan’s choice to leave the S on the factory floor shouldn’t raise too many eyebrows. Elsewhere, the SL now gets a powered panoramic sunroof as a standard kit, bumping its price to $41,880, while the top-rung Platinum commands $45,930.
This rig’s powertrain specs are familiar for ’24, showing up as a 3.5-liter engine rated for 260 horsepower and 240 lb-ft of torque. This is lashed to a continuously variable transmission, operating under the Xtronic banner and depressingly recognizable to anyone who’s been in a Nissan showroom over the last decade. Front-wheel drive is standard but all-wheel drive is available for 1,700 smackers across the board.
The departure of the S means Nissan’s suppliers no longer need to deliver cloth seats for this thing, nor do they need to fire up the milling machines for basic wheels or even manually adjusted passenger perches. Gauges remain analog when most competitors have long switched to digital real estate and an 8-inch infotainment screen is among the segment’s smallest. Still, modern touches like USB-C ports and the like crop up around the interior, though this gotta be one of the few machines in 2024 to come standard with a CD player on some trims.
Cynical readers will say this sort of feature consolidation is a harbinger of the model’s impending cancellation – and combined with the lack of meaningful updates in recent years to the Murano, plus an industry’s obsession with electrification, they may have a point. Still, compared to other Nissan models, it’s not like the Murano is stuck to showroom floors; through the first half of 2023, the brand moved 21,188 of the things, far and away from the 147,745 Rogue crossovers but well ahead of the hulking Armada. For comparison, the also-outdated Ford Edge sold 46,484 units during the same time frame.
[Images: Nissan]
Become a TTAC insider. Get the latest news, features, TTAC takes, and everything else that gets to the truth about cars first by subscribing to our newsletter.
via Autobuzz Today
Comments
Post a Comment