GRR Garage: Nissan X‑Trail – Orange is the new black

So when we go down to our local dealer to pick our the next daily driver our eyes are really making up what it’s going to look like all along.

Paint jobs can be a hard thing to get right. There’s often a small number of standard colours and then a selection of ‘optional’ ones which you could spec up to should you wish. In a previous life, this writer owned a Skoda CitiGo (on finance, of course, it’s gone back now) that was red. Red’s never a colour in which I would have thought to buy a car, but the only other free option was white and I didn’t fancy a white CitiGo. To let you in on a secret the chap from Skoda when I bought it complained that no one upgraded the colour on their CitiGos, because each extra colour is £500 more no matter which Skoda it may be. So a CitiGo or Rapid’s scheme will set you back as much as a Karoq or Superb. 

Anyway, we digress, the reason paint has come into the equation here is the divisive nature of the extremely orange job that’s been done to our long-term Nissan X-Trail. It’s a scheme that has instantly divided opinion in our office. My colleague Erin Baker is rather keen on it, but our Production Editor Ethan Jupp (who daily drives a black-ish Freelander) was decidedly not when it arrived.

It’s not slightly less than bright orange, due to the extremely muddy nature of the roads of Surrey and West Sussex, and accidentally finding ourselves overtaking a gritter just at the moment it turned on its spray… So has the colour mellowed on anyone?

It turns out it has. It could be something to do with cars always looking quite good in the hue that they are launched in, and which is seen on the adverts (you know the one, where an X-Trail is seen skiing down some gravel?) or it could be that the perception of reflected light coming from the big Nissan has slightly changed as we became more accustomed to it. It actually looks quite good around the estate and nowhere near as jarring as first feared. It’s a £575 option, so you’re probably not going to see the majority of X-Trails in it, but to let you in on a little more of that secret, that’s exactly the same as it would have cost to paint my tiny city car. All things considered, that’s not bad.

MPG this week: 38.5