‘It’s Like An Urus, But Cool!’ How Our Ridiculous Convertible SUV Stood Out Among Lamborghinis, Ferraris, And The World’s Best Exotics

Perhaps I only noticed because we were afraid to put the top up, but I couldn’t drive 50 feet last week without hearing someone yell out, “Yo, that’s the dopest car here,” or “That’s the best car I’ve seen this week,” or, my favorite, “It’s like an Urus, but cool!” Old people, young people, valets, and even a guy in a tastefully spec’d Bugatti Chiron.

In more than 15 years of driving everything from Suzukis to Ferraris, I’ve never gotten as much positive (and bewildered) attention as I have behind the wheel of a lightly modified Nissan Murano CrossCabriolet. I think the strange convertible SUV, which we bought as part of a partnership with XPEL, might have won Monterey Car Week. This is quite the achievement when you consider that this is the greatest collection of cars in one place, at one time, anywhere on the planet.

People either love the Murano CrossCabriolet for what it is or see it as a glitch in the Matrix and have to know more. I was lucky enough to put lots of miles on car, and it’s a shock to me that so many people walked past Ferraris to come and shake my hand! It was truly, utterly baffling.

If you were at Car Week, then you know what I’m talking about. In a place filled with the rarest supercars, exotics, and classic cars, the Murano stood out like a sore purple thumb (the gold-painted Tri Bar wheels and big Vredestein tires didn’t hurt). Don’t believe me? We only managed to capture a fraction of the accolades on camera, but here’s some of it.

Other people, like popular and knowledgeable carspotter gailsgarage296, flocked to the car. Here’s her listing the CrossCab as one of her best finds at all of Car Week:

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Gail (@gailsgarage296)

How We Landed On The CrossCabriolet

And this was the plan! Well, this was sort of the plan. We knew we’d put XPEL paint protection film (PPF) on half of a car and utterly wreck the unprotected side as a demonstration of what PPF can do. Our thought process was the following: We need something that people would respond to, whether positively or negatively, but we didn’t want something so precious that folks would get mad at us for, you know, cop-sliding and dragging sharp handcuffs across the hood.

The Murano CC is the perfect fit. The crew at SavageGeese made a hilarious, semi-fictionalized account of the vehicle’s history last year, and it got a positive response:

The joke here is that the Murano is such a beloved and hard-to-find vehicle that Doug DeMuro couldn’t get one, and had to settle on a Porsche Carrera GT instead. There are few vehicles that are so often the butt of enthusiast jokes. And this goes back to the beginning; the car is often called “God’s Chariot,” a nodding reference to the first review in Car And Driver, when John Pearley Huffman waxed mythological about the CC’s reveal:

Icarus may have had wings of wax and feathers, but it did not make him a bird. And when the wings fastened with wax melted off, he found he was a man high in the air without a chute. And a Centaur has never won the Derby of Kentucky.

Thus is the conundrum that confounds all the gods but one. Who would spend at least $47,190 of the American dollars for a CrossCabriolet? Demeter, the goddess of fertility, would find her seed without purchase in it. Aphrodite sees no great beauty in it for her to love. And Zeus would insist that his reach at least the level of  Infiniti.

That leaves Hera, with her emptied nest. Once, she had to move offspring around, but now she lives near the course of golf  behind the gates in the community of Olympus. She no longer needs a crossover to move from brunch with Gaia to dinner with Hemera. Yet she likes to drive up high as is the crossover’s way, wants to be in the sun, and her only cargo is the dog of  laps. It is for her that the Ghosn has commissioned the Murano CrossCabriolet in the far-off land of Nippon.

As predicted by nearly everyone, the Murano CrossCabriolet was a failure. A failure so huge that enthusiasts mostly laugh at it, and everyone else, it seems, forgot about it.

Enthusiasts Love It

The drive up to Monterey involved Jason and Beau in the GTD and me/David/Griffin in the Murano. Our goal was to try to get the GTD to Hagerty’s Motorlux event on time. This involved a wild trek across the desert. By the time we got to the actual event, I admit I was a little wiped. Did I have the energy for this?

As soon as the thought crossed my mind, I noticed Photographer/Car Guru/Nicest Guy In Cars Larry Chen pulling up in his extraordinarily clean R34 GT-R. I was suddenly awake. I love GT-Rs, and it’s always a delight to bump into Larry. His show on Hagerty (go watch it) is sponsored by XPEL, so he immediately knew the Murano and excitedly approached the car with his GT-R key.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by The Autopian (@theautopian)

Because he’s a nice guy, Larry initially only scratched up the PPF’s side of the car, knowing that there would be no long-term damage; we don’t usually encourage people to do this, but anyone with an R33 or R34 GT-R key gets a pass. What I don’t think Larry initially realized is that whatever happens to one side of the car has to happen to the other side, meaning that he’d have to key the unprotected side. After a polite hesitation, Larry obliged our request and autographed the car (we haven’t attempted to cure the PPF yet, but after a day baking in the sun, the protected side was almost entirely clean of Larry’s key scratches; the other side now features permanent marks a legend).

Events like this kept happening. We were driving by the Slate Auto activation when the crowd that came to see the company’s EV truck/SUV cheered for us to turn around. The folks at Slate even asked if they could take the car for a drive:

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by The Autopian (@theautopian)

Perhaps they were doing market research?

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by The Autopian (@theautopian)

While the car was slightly overshadowed by the GTD and all the other cars at Exotics on Broadway, I’d guess that 300-400 people came up to talk to us about the Murano during the day. Most of them knew what it was, but not all.

Maybe one of my favorite interactions was with a guy in a Bugatti Chiron outside of our hotel. It’s funny, generally, to park this car next to hypercars, and you might assume a hypercar owner would blanche at the proximity. That’s not what happened. The Chiron driver was excited to see the Murano and talk about it with us. We got thumbs up from people in Lamborghinis! It was wild.

‘Is That A Concept Car?’

With its bulbous haunches, bizarre proportions, and neck-high beltline, the Murano CC doesn’t seem real. Monterey Car Week is full of enthusiasts, but it’s also a place where people live the 51 other weeks of the year. A small percentage of enthusiasts and a giant percentage of normal people assumed one of two things:

• This was a concept car that was never made.
• This was a custom job we executed to perfection.

I’m not entirely surprised about the concept car assumption, given that no person in their right mind would ever consider actually putting one of these into production. It does feel like a concept car that Nissan made 6,000 of, and not a real car. The question about it being a custom vehicle always made me chuckle.

The assumption here is that we cut two doors of the Murano and then somehow fitted a snug, electromechanical roof. I wish we were capable of such greatness (or foolishness). I loved this question because it allowed me to try and explain that this was a real, actual vehicle that people (not many) bought. Everyone was surprised.

Weird Cars Are The Ultimate Hack

In starting this project, our goal was to find something that would grab attention. In that we succeeded. Where we may have gone wrong was in assuming that the Murano CrossCabriolet is disposable because the tops have a 100% failure rate. People genuinely love these cars now. With the Aztek we drove last year to Car Week, most people viewed the car as a joke and not something to treasure.

The Murano CrossCabriolet is treasured in a strange sort of way, which makes it an ultimate hack for a place like Car Week. If you show up in an exotic, you’ll certainly get a lot of attention, but it’s hard to have the best exotic. For every limited-run Koenigsegg, there’s an even more limited-run Pagani. For every rare-spec vintage Pegaso there’s an even rarer-spec vintage Maserati.

All those cars are amazing to see, and there’s no real “winning” Car Week because the point isn’t to have the best car, it’s just to be able to share something you love with as many people as possible. Because the Murano CrossCabriolet is so out of place and, by its size, so hard to miss, bringing it to Pebble allowed us the opportunity to share the love with more people than we’ve ever had before. That feels a lot like winning.

Photo: Griffin Riley