The Nissan Qashqai changed British driveways forever – but did it change them for the better?

If you want someone to blame for Britain’s obsession with the SUV, you can look towards the Nissan Qashqai. Twenty years after its unveiling, I’ve driven all three generations of the crossover that changed British car-buying habits – and I’m not convinced that its influence has been entirely positive.

In 2006, Nissan abandoned plans for a new Almera hatchback, concerned that it simply wouldn’t sell well enough. Instead, it unveiled something totally different in Paris in September 2006 – a family SUV, designed to blend the usability and practicality of a hatch or estate with the desirability and high driving position of an SUV.

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That sounds perfectly ordinary today, but Britain’s car market looked very different in 2006. The Ford Focus, Vauxhall Astra and Ford Fiesta topped the sales charts, while the Renault Mégane, Volkswagen Golf, Ford Mondeo and even the Vauxhall Zafira MPV made the top ten. Not one SUV featured.

The Toyota RAV4, the Honda CR-V and the Land Rover Freelander had already brought SUV styling to a more ‘ordinary’ motorist. But the Qashqai was intended as a direct replacement for a family hatchback rather than a domesticated version of an off-roader – or, as 30-plus-year Nissan veteran engineer David Moss puts it – ‘car-up, not SUV-down’.

The original Qashqai I’m driving is a 2008 model, in entry-level ‘Visia’ trim and powered by a 1.6-litre petrol engine. Other than being desperately slow by today’s standards, there’s a lot to like – it’s comfortable, all the controls are light and you get a jacked-up driving position without having to drive something truly massive. More broadly, it’s lovely to have so many physical buttons everywhere, after weeks in fully touchscreen-driven modern cars. 2008 was a purer time.

In an era when the family MPV – boxy, practical, deeply unstylish – was at the height of its popularity, the Qashqai offered a more desirable alternative. It split the difference, offering the raised seating position and chunky styling of an SUV without the expense or bulk of a traditional off-roader or the indignation of driving a big van.

Reception from the media was lukewarm. “Nissan wants you to see the Qashqai as part-SUV, part-coupe and part-MPV. It is none of these,” reported Autocar. Channel 4’s 4Car brutally summed it up as “Expensive, impaired economy, confused styling”.

“Even the media, when it first came out, didn’t get it,” recalls Moss. Nevertheless, buyers disagreed with critics and the Qashqai was an immediate hit. UK sales began in 2007 and climbed steadily each year, entering the top 10 best-sellers list in 2010.

“I’d never seen people waiting months and months for cars before,” says Moss, adding that Nissan was forced to add another shift of workers to its Sunderland plant to satisfy demand.

Around this time, alternatives scrambled to launch – the Volkswagen Tiguan and Ford Kuga in 2008, the Peugeot 3008 in 2009, the Kia Sportage in 2010. I ask Moss whether Nissan really created the market, or whether it was simply ahead of a trend that would have happened anyway. He’s having none of it. “There was no wave to start with. We actually created something that was different.”

By the time the second-generation Qashqai arrived in 2014, it was competing with 17 alternatives, from the Mitsubishi ASX to the Mazda CX-5. Jumping into a 1.5-litre diesel automatic from 2019, I’m struck by how unremarkable it feels. It’s more refined, more comfortable and more modern, but the initial revolutionary idea has, by this point, become completely ordinary.

Whatever its wider legacy, though, there’s no denying what the Qashqai has done for British industry. Every European-market Qashqai has been built at Nissan’s Sunderland factory, and by 2025 an astonishing 4.5 million had rolled off its production lines – an average of one every two and a half minutes since production began.

The Qashqai helped turn Sunderland into a manufacturing powerhouse, with Nissan’s UK operation now employing around 6,000 people at the plant and supporting another 30,000 jobs in the supply chain. It has been a phenomenal British success story, even if the badge on the bonnet is Japanese.

Fast-forward to 2026 and the sales charts have been turned upside down. In 2006, not a single SUV made the top ten. In 2026, six of the ten best-sellers are SUVs – including the Qashqai itself, still in fourth place. Some brands have shifted wholesale towards SUVs – Ford in particular killed off the Mondeo, Fiesta and Focus after decades at the top – and the MPV class is all but dead, limited to a few electric options or commercial-based vans-with-seats.

Driving the latest Mk3 Qashqai, it’s easily the best of the three. Its e-Power hybrid system is brilliantly efficient and great to drive, and the rest of the car strikes a nice balance between practicality and tech. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a better family car than the equivalent hatch or estate.

I drive dozens of new cars every year, and I still find myself wondering why more people don’t buy hatchbacks or estates. These lower, lighter cars are more entertaining to drive, more fuel-efficient, and cost less to buy and run. A Peugeot 308 estate, for example, identically-specced to a 3008 SUV, saves you more than £3,500, yet has a larger boot, better fuel economy, and better performance from the same engine. Is the higher driving position and more stylish body really worth it?

I can understand the appeal, of course. A higher seating position makes it easier to get in and out, while parents will appreciate not having to bend so far to strap children into their car seats. And some SUVs really are impressively practical. But I’m not convinced those advantages always outweigh the compromises.

Moss repeatedly told me that Nissan wanted the Qashqai to be a car with the practicality, efficiency and driving characteristics of a hatchback – yet in the rush to make everything look like an SUV, manufacturers seem to have forgotten some of the things that made hatchbacks so good in the first place.

And how many manufacturers have abandoned the potential next big innovation, because they’re worried that if it’s not an SUV, it won’t sell? The next Qashqai-style game-changer could be sat in a backroom at manufacturer HQ, just waiting to take the market by storm – but abandoned while everyone just sells identikit SUVs instead.

The Citroen C5 X was a genuinely unusual family car with superb comfort and distinctive styling, but it left the market with no direct replacement after disappointing sales. The Renault Espace and Scenic, both pioneers of the MPV space, have both morphed into SUVs. In fact, one Mercedes designer recently put it rather bluntly: “SUVs have killed the MPV market.”

The Qashqai was conceived as a way to offer buyers more choice – but two decades on, it may have had the opposite effect.

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