Here’s a neat little tidbit you probably didn’t know: this 2024 Nissan Ariya was supposed to be the new Murano.
A couple of months ago, Nissan invited us down to Tennessee to check out the 2025 Murano. Everyone knocks Nissan for keeping their stuff around way too long, but they swear they wanted to drop the new Murano much sooner. Except sometime around 2021, they polled a number of existing (and loyal) Murano owners and discovered that they weren’t ready to go electric.
This was a problem, because the new Murano was supposed to be all-electric. If you’re thinking, “hey, wait a minute…” you’re right. Nissan decided to split the electric one into its own model—and thus, the Ariya was born in 2022. And now, for the 2025 model year, a thoroughly reworked (and gas-powered) Murano joins the Ariya in Nissan dealers.
What can we say? Life finds a way.
A few years into the Ariya’s life cycle, we can’t help but wonder why we aren’t see more of these on the road. Nissan’s latest design language seems to be polarizing for a lot of people, but the Ariya wears the blob-on-wheels look better than most. Its creases and folds don’t come across as overstyled, the rakish roofline flows well, and the rear light bar is especially striking at night and carries into the 2025 Murano. Totally nit-picking here, but some wilder colours would suit the Ariya well; I’d love to see the new Kicks’ Yuzu Yellow here, or even the new Murano’s striking Aurora Blue hue. I’m so over primer grey.
Everyone also knocks Nissans for looking more than a little dated inside, but the Ariya keeps things contemporary by doing what everyone else is doing—leaning into minimalism. The dash is dominated by two 12.3-inch displays, one for the digital gauge cluster and the other for the infotainment. The interface is easy to use overall, but some might notice the displays are mismatched. Maybe it’s just us, but the gauge cluster seemed sharper and had deeper contrast than the infotainment touchscreen, which seemed washed-out and a bit blurry by comparison. Not to mention, it wasn’t always responsive to inputs. And the icons to switch on the heated seats and steering wheel were way too small.
OK, rant over. The rest of the interior is dressed in good materials and fit-and-finish, contrast stitching to class up the joint, and a capacitive touch-panel for climate control that we’d ordinarily dislike, but here it’s integrated into a piece of faux wood trim. It’s a really clever design touch repeated on the centre console, which also houses controls for a powered storage compartment that slides out from below the climate controls—very cool at first, but the controls need to be one-touch. Beyond that, the Ariya’s lack of a transmission tunnel translates to generous legroom no matter where you sit, headroom is equally generous despite the sloping roofline, and with all seats down, the Ariya is about as roomy as the Mustang Mach-E and Blazer EV.
Nissan offers two powertrains with the Ariya. Our tester is the more powerful all-wheel-drive version. It uses two electric motors and an 87 kWh battery to produce 389 horsepower and 442 pound-feet of torque. Those are solid numbers for a primer grey blob-on-wheels, but the Ariya doesn’t do the thwack of insta-torque off the line. Instead, it kind of rolls into the power and builds forward velocity smoothly off the line, but if you floor it from a roll, the Ariya takes off.
That’s about it for the Ariya’s sporting pretensions, though—and that’s completely OK. It rides incredibly well; only the roughest of rough pavement and holiest of potholes make themselves known. It’s also incredibly well-isolated from wind and road noise at highway speeds—quiet enough to hear your own thoughts, like, “seriously, this thing does so many things well. Why don’t I see more of them on the road?” Then we plugged it in, and it all made sense. Charging the Ariya is a pain in the you-know-what.
Look, everyone knows EV range takes a hit when it’s cold out. Among the various motor-and-battery-and-wheel-size configurations available on the Ariya, Nissan quotes 430 kilometres for our dual-motor, big-battery, small-wheel tester—more than competitive with EVs like the Mach-E and Ioniq 5. Nevertheless, the best we could eke out in the nippy, mid-December air with temps around the freezing mark was 296 kilometres—a far cry from Nissan’s quoted figures, not to mention the original on-board estimate of 382 clicks.
OK, that’s to be expected, but the real kicker is charging. Upon plugging into the Level 2 charger at the office with a two-per-cent charge remaining, we were shocked to see a 14-hour and 59-minute charge time. Lo and behold, Nissan quotes 14 hours from zero-to-100 per cent on a Level 2 charger; plug into a Level 3 charger and Nissan quotes a 40-minute charge from 10 to 80 per cent, at speeds of 130 kW, or 90 minutes at a 50 kW station—which in our anecdotal experience, are easier to find locally. Either way, you’ll absolutely need a home charger, or you’ll absolutely need to plan road trip routes or overnight stays around Level 3 chargers. Otherwise, it’s nearly impossible to make the Ariya work, leaning on any sort of public charging below 50 kW.
And that’s really too bad, because the 2024 Nissan Ariya is otherwise a competent and well-rounded commuter crossover. It has all the right ingredients—it’s punchy, refined, so very serene, and roomy. But until Nissan figures out how to make charging much less of a pain in the you-know-what, maybe those Murano owners they polled were onto something.
