But the Dualis not only straddles the practical sides of motoring, but also works within two distinctively different car cultures. That's because it combines European dynamics and Japanese quality. This is the first vehicle to be designed at Nissan’s new European design centre in London. Those sold in Australia are built in the Nissan plant in the UK. It's a big seller in the Euro market (where it is sold with the slightly odd name of Qashqai, a title that Nissan Australia avoided after learning from the mistake of changing Pulsar's name to Tiida).

Nissan Dualis is now available in Australia with two-wheel drive and is being marketed as the Dualis Hatch in an attempt to capture buyers in the passenger-hatchback segment. But our test car last week was the fascinatingly stylish AWD variant. The all-wheel-drive models still appeal to us in any vehicle in this class as we do like to go exploring off sealed surfaces. But we can understand why many buyers who are looking purely for a spacious hatchback with a higher than average driving position would go for the lower cost of buying and running a 2WD.

Our road test Dualis was powered by a 2.0-litre, four-cylinder engine with 102 kW and 198 Nm combined with ran Nissan's interesting CVT automatic. This transmission has virtually an infinite number of ratios between the lowest and highest forward gears. There are also six pre-selected ratios that can be operated manually should the driver feel that constant gearing is best for a specific occasion.

Engine performance is good without being particularly exciting. Then again cars in this class are certainly not aimed at the keen driver so sparkling performance isn't demanded. During our test period we typically saw fuel consumption in the eight to ten litres per hundred kilometres range when on the open road and nine to eleven litres per hundred around town. These are about average figures for an SUV of this size. Interestingly, while we had this vehicle on test Nissan Australia announced it will be imported a facelifted version from about May 2010. This will have a revised front end shape that not only upgrades the appearance, but also makes it slightly more aerodynamic and therefore capable of lower fuel consumption.

Ride comfort is generally good, however the suspension is firm and may not be to all tastes. Try it for yourself and tell your Nissan dealer you would like to find some moderately rough roads to road test it for comfort. Some coarse-chip road surfaces caused more interior noise than we like, but that’s not unusual in European cars.