This digital rendering of the Nissan Ariya concept looks like someone sculpted a Nissan Juke of Silly Putty and stretched it—but the prototype at the Tokyo Motor Show wasn’t quite so bad

We’re hearing a lot these days about how electric and autonomous vehicles could present exciting opportunities to explore fresh, new approaches to automotive design. With a tone that strikes a note of the grandiose in a recently published interview with one of their design executives, the automaker is trying to position the Nissan Ariya concept, a crossover unveiled at the Tokyo Motor Show last October, as a move in that direction.

But sadly, the execution falls short.

I take no pleasure in rendering  this kind of assessment of an innovation attempt by Nissan, an automaker that I admire not only for their great legacy of legendary vehicles like the classic 240/260/280 Z cars, for glorious generations of Skylines—and, of course, for the GTR—but also for the brighter spots in their current lineup.

Nissan also deserves kudos for their continued commitment to manufacturing sedans and sports coupes in an environment that has Detroit clinging to the delusion that everyone in the U.S. wants either a pickup or a crossover. Moreover, with the Versa, they are offering new-car options of decent quality for buyers at the entry level or with limited budgets.

But then there is this Ariya thing.

Maybe Nissan would have been better off with a more low-key approach to the concept’s positioning, along the lines of “here’s what we’re thinking our next-generation electric crossover, with some enhanced ‘vehicle intelligence’ technologies, might look like.”

That isn’t what they did, however.

Instead, Nissan is trying to make the questionable claim that the Ariya concept is something bold and game changing.

If you think I’m exaggerating, note that, in the October 22 press release announcing Nissan Ariya concept, Nissan characterized Ariya as possessing “a look that signals a complete reinvention of the brand’s design.”

Take a moment and just look at it. Isn’t that a just a bit of a stretch? Or maybe a whopper of a stretch?

As Program Design Director Giovanny Arroba explains it in an interview released by Nissan on February 25, “It started with our vision of how to shape the future. I wanted to merge form with the unique experience of an EV, and the autonomous and connected technology that Nissan Intelligent Mobility represents. The relatable attraction of the automobile as a dynamic object to be driven is essential for the concept.”

That sounds just dandy, but there’s a problem: with the Nissan Ariya concept, the automaker has over-promised and under-delivered. While the interior boasts some interesting touches like carpeting in a copper color that, in the words of Color and Material Designer Akiko Kitagawa, “represents electrification,” from the outside it ends up looking mostly like a very ordinary crossover.

In its basic shape, it doesn’t diverge in anything approaching a revolutionary way from a vehicle like the Nissan Murano, for example.

Forget about forward-thinking concepts—there are much better examples that you can already see on the road today, like the Porsche Cayenne or even pretty much any model in the Mazda CX series, of how you can make a crossover look striking.

But if you saw this Nissan Ariya concept on the road, you could easily blink and miss it. The Ariya would blend right in with all the staid Buick Encores, Chevy Equinoxes, and Ford Edges on the road.

The one good thing I can say about the prototype Ariya that Nissan unveiled at the Tokyo motor show is that it looks a lot better than the computer-generated rendering that, for some reason, Nissan decided to showcase with the Arroba interview on their media website.

When I first saw that rendering and assumed that it was an accurate depiction of the concept crossover Nissan displayed at the Tokyo Motor Show, I was aghast, and wrote a scathing first draft of this article before realizing that the actual prototype ended up looking quite a bit better.

But the computer-generated rendering of the Nissan Ariya concept looks a lot like what you would get if someone made a perfect scaled-down sculpture of a Nissan Juke out of Silly Putty, stretched it, and then smoothed out those horrific wheel arches that were Juke’s grotesque visual signature.

When you realize that this concept comes from the same design director who, as documented in the Brazilian automotive blog Motor Show, brought us the abhorrent Nissan Juke, it all makes a sad kind of sense.

My intent here is not to disparage Arroba’s work across the board. He has been with Nissan for nearly two decades and has had his hand in much of their work beyond the Juke and now the Ariya.

For instance, the 2020 models of both the Nissan Sentra and the Nissan Versa have taken big steps ahead from a design perspective.

Arroba was also involved with the 2009 Infiniti Essence concept, which was truly a thing of beauty.

The Juke, however, is a perplexing, “what could they possibly have been thinking” case. And I am far from alone among automotive critics in not having any love for the Juke.

While the Juke, oddly, did have somewhat of a cult following, the U.S. market essentially rejected it, in spite of the current popularity of crossovers. Nissan discontinued the model in the U.S. after the 2017 model year, in which the Juke had abysmal sales of only a little over 10,000 units.

A new-generation Nissan Juke launched in Europe for the 2020 model year, but Nissan currently appears to have no plans to return the model to the U.S. For the 2020 model, the original Juke’s most offensive design elements, like bloated wheel arches, were toned down dramatically, with the end result being a more or less ordinary-looking subcompact crossover.

Nevertheless, the computer-generated design of the Nissan Aria concept electric crossover suggests that Arroba and his team have not entirely abandoned some of the basic design elements of the Juke, and that’s concerning.

If that rendering was supposed to propose a future of automotive design in an emerging environment of electrified and autonomous transportation, you can have that future.

However, somewhere down the line, most of the Juke-like elements found their way out of the prototype Nissan sent to the Tokyo Motor Show. That makes their decision to still feature the Juke-like sketch with the Arroba interview hard to fathom.

But the fortunate outcome that the prototype turned out better than the digital rendering doesn’t address the fundamental problem: the failure of the concept to deliver on the grand promise of a new and interesting vision for the future of vehicle design in  a supposedly brave new world of electrified, intelligent mobility.

Nissan’s new takes on the Sentra and Versa are green chutes of hope for Nissan. And, for that matter, the LEAF, Nissan’s current offering in the all-electric battery EV space, is not a bad looking car—especially in its Nismo performance-tuned version.

Hopefully, Arroba and his team will be able to build on this progress and translate some of it into their crossovers and SUVs, both internal-combustion and electric.

Based on what we see in the Nissan Ariya concept, however, they are nowhere near that point yet.