Design story - Nissan Juke, different crossover     by Massimo Nascimbene   One year ago, there would have been very few willing to bet that the extreme forms of the Nissan Qazana would ever make it to production. And yet the Juke has remained remarkably faithful to the concept. “After the Qashqai, we asked ourselves which direction we should take” explains Atsushi Maeda, project leader of the Juke at Nissan Design Centre in London. “One thing for certain was that we didn’t just want to do a scaled-down version of the same car. We did, however, want a product that would stand apart from other crossovers, so we worked with the idea of combining a compact SUV and a sports car, to create a kind of icon for the urban jungle: a youthful, nonconformist vehicle with a strongly emotive and striking image.” The Juke actually started life in 2006, when the phenomenal success of the Qashqai was still just a dream. While the model will be sold in countries all over the world (it will be produced in both Europe and Japan and also sold in the US), its primary target markets are the UK, Germany and Italy. The now standard global competition between the brand’s different design centres produced twelve sketches,seven of which were translated into clay models. Two of these seven were selected and built as executive models for the final selection process (in September 2007), which chose the car created by the London centre, which was more horizontal in layout than the solutions from Japan, with their more angular forms. This process came to a conclusion in January 2008, when the style of the Juke was definitely signed off. (The article continues in Auto & Design n. 183, page 37)