Nissan has injected a healthy dose of luxury and style into the Murano in an effort to push the vehicle upmarket for its fourth generation. With its most dramatic design redirection yet, the all-new-for-2025 Murano that results is an intriguing vehicle with a few glaring flaws.
Exterior
There’s a lot of the all-electric Ariya in the Murano’s exterior design language, which helps bring it together under the company’s familial styling umbrella. It’s attractive and a totally new direction for the Murano. Curvy and flowy, it’s a strange if not attractive thing to behold. Where the last Murano wasn’t particularly good looking, the new one is actually something Nissan should be proud of, at least when it comes to how the vehicle presents itself.
One thing we can’t unsee: The D-pillar looks like the “fish” that everyone draws as a kid.
Interior
Minimalism is the name of the game is luxury these days, or at least that’s what the brands want you to think. Nissan followed Tesla and VW’s lead, bringing much of the controls for radio and HVAC into the touchscreen. It allowed Nissan to get a little more creative and artistic with the way the cabin looks and feels, for better and worse. It’s airy, visibility is good, and somehow it brings a calming, pleasing aura with the dual-pane sunroof open. Initial impressions are strong.
In traditional Nissan fashion the seats are very good, and in traditional Nissan fashion the infotainment is not. The former we are big fans of, finding them comfortable and cushy, but the latter is a big detriment. The haptic buttons embedded in the dash are pleasant to look at but don’t always provide enough feedback to tell you that you’ve pushed them, and using the touchscreen can be infuriating if not unsafe. Reaching controls at the far side of the screen means leaning that way from the driver seat, and the software is slow to respond and difficult to navigate. Style comes at the expense of usability here.
Daily Driving
As a daily driver, there’s good and bad with the Murano. It’s extremely easy to drive around town and insulates the occupants from the outside world quite well. In hectic day-to-day city life, you could do a lot worse. Plus, it has healthy legroom in the front and rear which makes for a very easy-to-use family vehicle. You won’t steal the show in the day care lot, but it does everything on the functional front in this category very well. The ride quality is also something we can applaud.
On the other hand, we’re not huge fans of the new turbocharged four cylinder engine and its attached transmission. In the normal drive mode it’s infuriatingly slow to respond and in sport mode becomes needlessly loud and thrashy. It makes us miss the outgoing Murano’s V6, and that the new one doesn’t get drastically better MPG doesn’t help its case. Throttle tuning needs a calibrating of the brain, too; there’s a big dead spot between when you want the vehicle to accelerate and it actually beginning to happen. This was never the case with the ‘ol V6.
As for tech, there’s plenty of it. Things like a 360-degree camera, intelligent cruise control, and 12.3-inch touchscreen with wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto are all niceties that make the Murano pleasant to be in and use. We do wish the screen was more responsive and the reverse camera had resolution that didn’t feel like it was stuck in 2005, but here we are.
Our other issue with the Murano is the hyper-active automatic reverse braking stop. Backing up like usual, the vehicle has a tendency to suddenly apply maximum emergency braking as if it’s trying to prevent something from being crashed into or run over, in turn slamming heads into the headrests and scaring younger occupants. It’s still exclusively a Nissan thing in our experience; we’ve backed into the same driveway in the exact same manner with hundreds of vehicles over the years and Nissan SUVs are the only ones to do this.
Conclusion
The elephant in the room is the price tag, which for our highly-optioned test vehicle came in at $53,950. All vehicles are expensive today, or at least more so than they used to be, but that’s a hefty price tag for a Murano. It starts at $40,470 and quickly approaches the $50k mark. With so many luxury vehicles that can be had in this range, the asking price might be a bit of a stretch.
At the end of the day, the new Murano brings style to the table that it doesn’t back up with equally good tech or driving refinement, especially given the price. We like the way it looks, how easy it is to live with, and the high degree of comfort present, we’re just not convinced it’s the full package for the $50k range.
Yay
- Comfortable seats and spacious cabin
- Easy to use in everyday life
- Styling that pushes the envelope
Nay
- Upmarket price without upmarket experience
- Cavernous disconnect between gas pedal and movement
- Fuel economy hasn’t kept up with the times
The Takeaway
The 2025 Nissan Murano Platinum is stylish, quirky, and very comfortable, but ultimately it just represents a slightly different shade of vanilla. The Murano is actually very good in this era of its life and yet it still feels more of a “why” than anything else, perhaps existing more to bridge the gap to the vehicle’s Infiniti QX60 platform-mate, all while incapable of hiding that it’s still a Nissan in the details.