2020 Nissan Sentra Sedan

It's an almost winter day in Southern California, and the tourists in their campers have all returned home, so we're sailing along Pacific Coast Highway in the 2020 Nissan Sentra.
Immediately apparent is that the brand-new cockpit in Nissan's redesigned compact sedan bears no resemblance to any Sentra we've driven before, and that's a very good thing.

There's real style here, even if the flat-bottomed steering wheel is now a bit of a design cliché. Most of the materials are pliant to the touch and attractive in a way that you can imagine a designer and not an accountant was involved in their selection. And this time around, Nissan nailed the driving position. Previous versions had the pedals too close and the steering wheel too far. We can see down PCH, the ocean, the palm trees with ease, and the standard Zero Gravity front seats are supportive and comfortable for hours at a time.

These simple upgrades add up to breathing life into a nameplate that has soldiered on with a rental-car persona for too many years. Built on the latest version of Nissan's global C-segment sedan architecture, the new Sentra is about the same size as before—overall passenger volume hasn't changed–but it's two inches wider overall with a similarly wider track, and there's a commensurate increase in passenger hip room.

The designers did lower the roofline, and it's shorter by nearly two inches, making the Sentra look more like a car and less like an awkward crossover-sedan monstrosity. That's also the inspiration behind the contrasting black roof option you can get on Sentra SR models that are gray, orange, or white. There's no significant decline in the published headroom dimension, but cars equipped with a sunroof are pretty tight for six-footers.

 of the last-generation Sentra, you might have noticed the uncompetitive acceleration. And before you get your hopes up, the NISMO and SR Turbo versions have been discontinued, at least for now. For 2020, all Sentra sedans receive a version of the Rogue Sport's powertrain: a 2.0-liter inline four-cylinder that gives 149 horsepower and 146 lb-ft of torque. There's no manual gearbox this time around, so you get a continuously variable automatic transmission (CVT) driving the front wheels. Nissan currently isn't in a financial position to spend money fine-tuning a gearbox that no one will buy.





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