A nice man from Nissan dropped by last week and took our long-terming Juke for its 5,000km visit to the car doctor. Surprisingly, and actually rather conveniently, it was serviced and dropped back off within the space of a few hours — a level of courtesy, I suspect, that isn’t extended to the average Juke buyer. Customers are offered two free services at 1,000km and 5,000km, following which it’s paid services every 5,000 klicks. Now, the book of automotive writing requires me to deploy post-service descriptions such as, “It feels tight as a drum now”, but since my backside isn’t blessed with telemetric abilities, I couldn’t tell the difference. One thing I will say though, is that the fuel economy has improved noticeably since the check-up. I’ve seen figures as low as 10 litres-per-100km. On the downside I’ve recently uncovered another slight niggle. To fold the back seats flat, you have to move the front seats halfway forward. Don’t do this and the rear headrests catch the back of the front seats. Very annoying. That said, I still rate the Juke as one of the more characterful small cars on sale today. Meanwhile, on a different note, a colleague who’s just got his driving licence has been agonising over his new car purchase. His needs are reasonable: Something that’s cheap to buy and run, drives well, and hopefully, stands out in a sea of soulless factory-produced metal boxes. I think I may have just the car for him. From gulfnews