First Drive: 2014 Nissan Rogue

Filed under: Crossover, Nissan, First Drives

When I first started in this whole automotive journalism biz, I held a sort of hodgepodge receptionist/gopher/production assistant role, and each morning as the staff filed in, I’d ask them how they liked whatever car they were assigned to drive the previous night. Most of my colleagues would regale me with anecdotes about how good or bad a vehicle was, but one co-worker, every single morning, would answer my query with the exact same phrase: “It was fine.”

I always assumed this was just a brush-off, an “ask me again after I’ve had a cup of coffee” sort of response. But then I found myself in a similar moment of brevity following the launch of the 2014 Nissan Rogue earlier this week. After returning home, a friend asked me what I thought of the new Rogue, and I replied, word for word, “It was fine.”

And, well, it was. Nothing worth wasting exclamation points over, good or bad. Aside from something like the interesting-to-drive Mazda CX-5 or funky-looking Jeep Cherokee, nothing in this class really tries to set the world on fire. And that, right there, is fine. Nissan doesn’t need to do anything crazy with its second-generation Rogue. It just needs to offer a well-equipped crossover that’s handsome, functional, efficient and priced right – sticking to the same formula that made the first-generation model so successful while offering the latest crop of creature comforts in a more modern package.

The 2014 Nissan Rogue checks all of these boxes. And it’s fine. Mighty fine.

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2014 Nissan Rogue originally appeared on Autoblog on Fri, 01 Nov 2013 11:57:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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