I Drove America’s Weirdest Crossover 4,050 Miles In A Week And It Was An Assault On My Senses

The great American road trip is the stuff of dreams. It’s so seductive that there are countless people who come from all over the world just to drive across America. Last week, I drove 4,050 miles on what felt like the ultimate road trip. I battled traffic in California, went rock crawling in Arizona, fought two sizable snowstorms, then covered incredible distance in massive Texas. I did it all from behind the wheel of one of the weirdest crossovers of all time, the Nissan Murano CrossCabriolet. Here’s how I feel after the epic drive.

The average American driver covers roughly 14,000 miles in a year. That’s roughly 270 miles a week, and just over a thousand miles in a month. Some folks, like my wife, put many more miles on their cars, adding 30,000 to 40,000 miles to their odometers each year. Meanwhile, professional drivers, like long-haul truckers, may do well over 100,000 miles in a year. But if you aren’t driving for your job, your mileage isn’y likely to be that crazy.

Last week, I drove so much that, had I continued my pace over a year, I would have driven over 210,000 miles. To put it another way, I spent the vast majority of my hours awake just driving, and had little time to look at the world, surf the web, or even eat. My steed for this trek was none other than the Autopian’s lifted Nissan Murano CrossCabriolet. Once hated and now forgotten, this convertible crossover was a moonshot for Nissan. How was it as a road warrior? Well, it’s complicated.

Setting The Stage

I honestly had no idea what to expect when my plane landed in Los Angeles on Monday. I had never even seen our CrossCab in real life, and the guys made a fabulous effort to tell me basically nothing about it to maximize the hilarity of me figuring out its issues. I did know some details about it: We got our CrossCab from Texas, and our partner at XPEL put paint protection film on exactly half of it. Our friends over at Vredestein hooked it up with Pinza AT tires. A lift kit and Ford Mustang wheels finished out the modifications. Then, boys being boys, the California Autopian bureau beat the crap out of the CrossCab, demonstrating the XPEL film is legitimately tough stuff. They also took it to Monterey, because how could you not?

Then, David sent me an opportunity that I simply could not refuse. He got wind of a 24 Hours Of Lemons rally going down in Texas. What is a Lemons Rally? Well, it’s a three-day scavenger hunt that, if you go hard in getting all of the checkpoints, will have you cover over a thousand miles within one region. It’s a great way to experience places you’ve probably never been to before. The Lemons Rally is also just awesome because everyone is silly. Most people wear costumes and have modified their cars in a fun way. It’s like a Gambler 500, but on the road! I’ll have a whole story about how fun the Lemons Rally was later.

Here’s the twist: when David messaged me about the rally, the CrossCab was still in Los Angeles. Nobody had driven the CrossCab on a true road trip yet, and certainly not a crazy long-haul cross-country trip. So, if the Autopian was to participate in the Lone Star/No Start Lemons Rally, we had to get the CrossCab to Texas. There was nobody better for the job than our resident crazy road-tripper, me!

The Glorious CrossCabriolet

I first saw the CrossCab in the most Autopian way. Our excellent photojournalist, Griffin, picked me up from a bus station in his sweet Corvette C6. Then, we rolled into a Galpin lot, where the Autopian’s offices reside. There, I saw David’s brother’s Mustang, our Pontiac Aztek, David’s disassembled Jeep ZJ, and the reference ZJ he bought to help him rebuild the disassembled one. Then, there it was in all of its purple glory.

The Autopian’s CrossCab looks bigger in person than it does in photos. The tires and lift kit give it legitimately great ground clearance, and the rig has an imposing presence. The beltline of our CrossCab is darn near as high up as the beltline of a full-size pickup truck.

In true Autopian fashion, Griffin and I weren’t given much before our long trip. We had no spare tire, no tools, no emergency kit, and only limited knowledge about the vehicle’s faults. I read most of the articles about the car, but I had forgotten a lot. Admittedly, when you write 4,000 words or more in a day, some knowledge ends up leaking through the cracks.

I knew that our CrossCab had a convertible roof that was on its last legs. I also knew that the roof’s folding mechanism is so horribly complex and unreliable that they have darn near a 100 percent failure rate, and repairs will probably cost nearly as much as you paid for the vehicle. Word from Jason was that the Cali crew tried their hardest not to cycle the roof open and closed because they had no idea which cycle would be the last. Jason was totally serious when he told me he thought the roof had maybe one or two closes left in it.

But I wasn’t told anything else. I was left to discover everything on my own. The quirks came on hard and fast. The CrossCab’s battery was dead, the key fob didn’t work, and the driver door handle had broken into two pieces, which meant that the door handle was frequently jammed.

I then immediately learned that there was technically a way to soft-brick the roof system. If you have the roof slightly open (or the car is like ours and the computer sometimes thinks the roof is slightly open) and you retract the cargo blind in the trunk, the trunk will then perma-lock itself, and the roof system will deactivate. You will then get a loud alarm when you drive any faster than parking lot speed. Opening the trunk through electrical methods becomes locked out.

It took me a while, but I figured out how to correct the soft lock. You have to stick the physical key into the hidden keyhole on the trunk, manually pop the lid, and put the cargo blind back into place. Then, you can either finish closing or opening the roof. In our case, since the roof was already closed, that meant just spamming the roof close button until the computer was satisfied enough.

Setting Off

The first leg was a roughly 500-mile drive to Munds Park, Arizona, a place near Flagstaff. It was on this drive that I learned that while we had a 3.5-liter V6 pumping out 265 HP and 248 lb-ft, it was seriously dulled out. This power has to move a nearly 4,500-pound whale of a crossover through a CVT. We only made it worse with the oversized all-terrain tires. Our CrossCab is properly slow, which is amusing given the legend of the VQ series of engines.

It was on the highway that I discovered three more problems. One was, gee, this thing is loud inside for a luxury crossover. I could clearly hear semi-trailer tires through the roof, and the interior had all kinds of loud squeaks, rattles, and scraping noises. There were times it got loud enough that I wondered if I should have brought my noise-reducing aviation headset.

The noise would be the least of our worries. The CrossCab had a voracious thirst for gas. The rig never got better than 17 mpg during the Flagstaff leg, and usually got way worse than that. We’d easily blow through three-quarters of the CrossCab’s 21.7-gallon fuel tank in only 160 miles.

It was in Arizona when I discovered that all of the CrossCab’s tires were sitting at 29 PSI. This also likely explained why the CrossCab’s steering felt wobbly and mushy during the beginning leg. I would experiment with tire pressures during the trip, eventually landing at about 40 PSI to 43 PSI. Pushing pressure up to that level not only resolved the mushy feeling but also increased fuel economy by an average of 3 mpg or so, depending on the situation.

A new issue developed early on. When we descended into Flagstaff, I heard some faint rotational noise from the front right of the vehicle. Griffin didn’t hear anything, so I thought that maybe I was hearing something that wasn’t there. Maybe it was tire noise from the chunky rubber?

It took until the next morning to confirm my fears: that rotational noise was the beginning of a wheel bearing dying. I consulted David and Matt, and based on my observations, it was decided to march forward and just monitor the bearing.

All of this set the stage for the rest of the trip. I would spend another 3,500 miles trying to keep the fuel economy gauge high, focusing some of my attention on the bearing, and listening to so much loudness coming from infinite directions.

Sensory Overload

At first, the novelty of the CrossCab initially wore off quickly. The abysmal fuel economy and the loudness alone annoyed me. Then there were the seats. Griffin found the passenger seat very uncomfortable, and he often made comments about feeling sore.

My problem with the seats was that the seat back in our CrossCab seems to curve outward slightly, and my back wasn’t particularly fond of it. Yet, this discomfort was only mild for me. It wasn’t torture like a plastic bus seat, but ever so slightly there that it was always at the back of my mind.

I began to see why the CrossCab was a failure. Why would anyone spend more money for a crossover with a tiny back seat, merely meh front seats, a barely usable trunk, a power-sapping CVT, and fuel economy that the EPA says is only 22 mpg at best?

It was only Tuesday when the CrossCab changed my tune. With its suspension lift and chunky tires on Mustang wheels, the CrossCab was never expected to be a pavement princess, but we did expect it to have some degree of off-roadability. Griffin chose Schnebly Hill Road near Sedona to put the CrossCab to the test. Schnebly Hill is an 11-mile route that starts pretty easy, but gets insanely rocky quickly. Apparently, the trail is so popular that you can get a Jeep badge for it.

Wait, This Is Actually Really Fun

Tuesday was the first day I was brave enough to lower the roof, and I was glad I did it, because it changed the game. Suddenly, everything made sense. The bad fuel economy, the tiny back seat, the non-existent trunk space, and the slow CVT all didn’t matter when the roof was down. Now, I understand the magic of the CrossCab. Here I was in a high-riding, easy-driving crossover with nothing but open air around me.

Taking it off-road only made the experience sweeter. My article on off-roading is still coming, so I’ll save the details for that piece. But we basically made the Murano into 80 percent of a Jeep with little more than huge tires and a lift kit. We had a Jeep Gladiator as a recovery vehicle, and I did everything the Jeep did, except for two obstacles. I even had a better departure angle than the Jeep truck!

Clearly, I wasn’t the only one who was amazed by the CrossCab. Everywhere we went, there were people giving thumbs up, asking questions, and telling us how cool our car was. Basically, nobody knew that Nissan had ever built a convertible crossover. Most people thought we built it ourselves. Those who did know what a Nissan Murano CrossCabriolet was said that they had never seen one in real life. Seriously, there were people who stopped their own cars, did a double-take, and then asked us how we built the CrossCab.

It took me only minutes with the top down to understand why the CrossCab existed. Now, I get why the handful of people who bought one bothered to do so. This is a convertible, but you aren’t sitting under the hoods of pickup trucks. This is a convertible, but you don’t have to lower yourself into a hard-riding car. This is a convertible from a normally pedestrian carmaker, but it’s so weird that everyone wants to talk about it. The CrossCab looks like a concept car that actually made it into production. It’s a novel and silly vehicle.

My newfound love for the CrossCab would be put to the test. When we finished off-roading in Sedona, we still had to drive to Texas, drive the Lemons Rally, and then I had to drive home. I estimated that the total trip was going to be about 3,400 miles. Thus, I thought we had 2,900 miles to go after Sedona.

My Road Trip Steed Was Weird

It didn’t take long to discover the CrossCab’s other quirks. The cruise control is slow to respond to hills. It’ll keep on the throttle for a couple of seconds after you start rolling downhill, resulting in you going about 5 mph faster than desired. It’ll also take too long to respond to a climb, resulting in you going 5 mph to 10 mph slower than desired. Chain enough hills together, and the car’s speed just wildly changes all over the place. Every once in a while, the cruise control also just gave up, turning itself off after failing to maintain speed while going uphill.

The fuel gauge also is not linear by any stretch of the imagination. The first half will last around 210 miles, while the second half will cover only 120 miles or so. This means that, when we were in remote places, I started worrying about the gas at the halfway mark.

I also found that the Murano’s old hard drive-based navigation system was useful as decoration at best. The roads on it were largely up to date, so that wasn’t the issue. Instead, the problem was that the map didn’t move as fast as the car did. At 75 mph, the map was sometimes nearly a mile behind our actual progress. So, we’d drive under a bridge, and 45 seconds later, the bridge would finally show up on the screen. To be fair, our CrossCab is 11 years old now, so the nav system is old tech. But it is a fun little quirk in this era of smartphone-based navigation.

I had a lot of time to study the CrossCab. I had so much time, even, that I was able to observe the speedometer and odometer error as I drove. Our new tire setup caused an error of about four percent. This meant that, if the speedometer read 75 mph, the car was actually going 78 mph. The odometer was also undercounting miles, too. Yet, the MPG guess-o-meter was right on the money compared to my by-hand calculations, which were performed by dividing the GPS distance traveled by fuel used.

Making My Quality Of Life Better

I also had enough time to fix the CrossCab’s smaller issues. The CrossCab’s broken driver door handle sliced a part of my hand open while we were in Sedona, so I put some super glue between the broken pieces.

The lack of a working key fob bothered me. For that, I discovered that our guys in California just never bothered to take the time to crack the fob open and replace the battery. I put in a new battery and fixed that in a jiff.

I even figured out the roof. I had been told that the roof had a knack for getting stuck. Indeed, the roof really did not like opening when I dropped it in Sedona. I became scared enough about the roof that I did not open it again until we got to the Lemons Rally.

The organizers of the Lemons Rally said that once we dropped the top, it had to stay down the whole time. If we were seen with the top up, we’d lose all of our points. The only exception was for a security situation, such as being parked at a hotel, store, or restaurant. What this meant was that I would open and close the top regularly. Amazingly, the top’s operation got better with each cycle. The top started working well enough that the convertible top warning light of death eventually extinguished.

The top occasionally got stuck, and I learned how to beat it. I noticed the mechanism only got stuck when the system skipped a step. Sometimes, the skipped step would be something small, like the deck lid flaps not deploying, or a big step, like forgetting to close the lid. I found that if I hit the top again, the system would backtrack to the skipped step, perform the action, and then successfully close or open. There was no need to panic!

Truth be told, over 4,050 miles I had learned everything about this car as if it were one of my own. I grew to love the CrossCab. In fact, I adore it so much that I’m already begging the guys to let me keep it forever once we’re done with it. I don’t care about the scratches and dents!

What Made The 4,050 Miles Grueling

Not everything was glamorous. There were times when my rosy shades were busted. One of those times was when we were on the Lemons Rally and were driving west into a wicked headwind in Texas. The CrossCab had to fight so hard to maintain the speed limit that fuel economy dropped to 10.6 mpg and then stayed there. It guzzled gas like a big block V8 pickup truck with none of the performance to show for it.

It wasn’t much better without a headwind. Our best tank was only 23 mpg, and that came after super careful driving. To be fair, we did put huge tires and a lift kit on it. However, the EPA said that these things got 22 mpg highway, anyway, so they aren’t particularly great when completely stock.

The failure mode of the front right wheel bearing was also really annoying. On Thursday, we left our overnight stop in Lubbock, Texas, to discover some insane vibration that occurred only during acceleration. I assumed that the front right axle was on its way out, since David told me it wasn’t in the greatest shape to begin with. Thankfully, the axle was okay. Instead, the wheel bearing failed in such a way that the whole vehicle shook like a Hitachi Magic Wand during acceleration.

Since I’m writing this, you can rest easy knowing that the car made it the whole trip without the bearing completely coming apart, but having a car that trembled like a chihuahua lost its amusement value pretty quickly. The trembling also made it extremely difficult to figure out if anything else broke.

But the worst was the fatigue. Being bombarded with loud noises for hours on end wore me out fairly quickly. By the nighttime portions of our drives, I felt properly tired, and I looked forward to when we stopped for the night. It was enough of a sensory overload that, if I got out of the car and talked to someone, it felt like I couldn’t hear them well at first.

The fatigue I felt driving the CrossCab was similar to what I feel when I drive my wife’s Scion iQ for extremely long distances. I get tired, and I cannot wait to stop for the night. That car, like the CrossCab, is also loud at highway speed.

Don’t Sleep In A CrossCab

Granted, that last complaint isn’t a big one if you’re a normal person and take regular breaks while driving on long trips. I take road trips by gobbling up as many miles as possible. I don’t stop for anything but gas. If I want food or a restroom break, they happen when I need gas. Some vehicles are good for this “cannonball” road trip style, like the Ford F-350. The CrossCab isn’t one of them.

The CrossCab also sucks to sleep in. If I take a trip that has an overnight halt, I sleep in the car once. This is a sort of stupid tradition I made for myself back in 2016 after getting tired on a road trip and not finding a suitable hotel before running out of energy. I figured if hotshot drivers could sleep in their vehicles, so could I. So, I started sleeping in my road trip vehicle, no matter if it’s a Smart Fortwo or a dually pickup.

My favorite non-RV to sleep in was the F-350 Super Duty Platinum Plus. Its rear bench was so huge and so comfortable that I’d rather sleep on it than chance a Super 8. The Chevy HHR was also shockingly nice to sleep in with nothing more than a yoga mat and a blanket. The CrossCab? It’s nearly impossible to sleep in the rear seat due to the hard-installed cupholders, and the front seats are too uncomfortable and don’t recline far enough. I’ll write about the sleeping experience in its own thing, but I found sleeping in the CrossCab preferable only to sleeping in a motel with bed bugs and no hot water.

I’d Happily Do It Again

Add it all up, and my body took a pounding from those 4,050 miles. I was so tired from all of the noise, sore from sleeping on a hard seat, and annoyed at my too-frequent gas station visits. I hated lugging my suitcase out of the backseat every night, and the constant vibrations got annoying so quickly. The car even somehow gave me bruises.

I feel like 4,050 miles also made me realistic about the CrossCab. I still love it dearly, but I’m not about to let that love blind me. The CrossCabriolet is a deeply flawed vehicle. Its trunk is too small for a week’s worth of luggage for two. Its fuel economy was bad even for 2014 standards. Its backseat is almost pointless. The roof will break, and if you bother to fix it, doing so might break you. On one hand, the CrossCab doesn’t make any sense. It’s a convertible Nissan V6 crossover with V8 truck fuel economy, economy car noise levels, BMW repair bills, and Mazda Miata practicality. On the other hand, I am convinced that Nissan might have been onto something. Even with all of the downsides, I love the CrossCab.

But the next time I try to drive over 4,000 miles in a week, I probably won’t be so ambitious. There’s nothing wrong with stopping, taking a breather, and having a slow road trip rather than a speed run. I’m sure my body will thank me later, as will my hearing. Oh, who am I kidding? I’m going to keep doing my own cannonball runs just to regret it later.

Top graphic image: Griffin Riley