(Business 2.0) – Recently, professors at Vanderbilt and the University of Colorado determined that car lovers use their brains differently than the rest of us. When they see an unfamiliar car, their brains process the image holistically, in a micro-instant, and arrive at both an identification and an opinion as to whether said car is attractive or repellent. Normal people--ok, other people--have to process bits of the vehicle individually, until overall recognition kicks in. (All this was published in the April issue of Nature Neuroscience, in case your subscription has lapsed.) It's a good theory, but I'm afraid my neighbor Mrs. Foil shot it to hell the other day when I motored up in a lovely all-wheel-drive 2003 Nissan Murano, resplendent in its coppery hue. "That," she announced, "is the ugliest car I have ever seen."

Now, I find the Murano handsome. But my neighbor's opprobrium was so pronounced that I rang the folks at Nissan to see if such recoil was unusual. "Actually, we not only expected such a reaction, we hoped for it," Darrell Ida, the company's senior product planner, told me. "If we didn't get that, we wouldn't have done our job." Well, kudos, I guess. But what Ida meant is that the Murano's looks were intended to be polarizing. Nissan spent five years and shuffled through dozens of iterations to achieve the look of the vehicle, knowing full well that some people would instantly hate it (e.g., Mrs. Foil), while others would quickly like it (e.g., me). Such aesthetic tightrope walking is scientific these days: Nissan tweaked the design until it arrived at a point where opinion diverged neatly into thirds. That is, a third of the people who saw it hated it, a third loved it, and the final third could possibly warm in their ardor at some future date.

Fortunately, while Nissan's designers twiddled with the Murano's cosmetics, its engineers set about making it revolutionary in every other regard. Most impressive is the vehicle's continuously variable transmission (CVT)--or, as some comic-book-soaked Nissanite named it, Xtronic. CVTs have been around for a while (the Honda Insight and Toyota Prius both use one), but this is the first vehicle to effectively marry it to a high-performance engine and all-wheel drive. Basically, the transmission uses two V-shaped pulleys linked by a connecting belt; increasing or decreasing the gap within the Vs allows the belt to ride higher or deeper within the cleft. This creates an infinite range of stepless gear ratios and eliminates the noisome shift-clunking and energy squandering of a conventionally geared transmission. Imagine shifting gears on your mountain bike, but without any gaps between those gears, and you'll get a good sense of what that means.

In years past, cars simply didn't have the computing juice to make all this efficiency possible. But today they do. In the Murano, sophisticated sensors and microprocessors continually monitor the shifting, fluidly determining the perfect combination of gear and engine revolutions per minute. So when you mash the accelerator on a hill, for instance, the Murano's transmission doesn't thumpingly hunt around for the best gear; nor does its engine repeatedly spike and fall as it ratchets among the gears. Instead, by crunching through a complex set of algorithms, the vehicle keeps its 245-horsepower V6 in perfect rpm match with the required gearing ratio. (If you rendered its revs on a graph, they would show a sine-like continuum, as compared with the craggy mountain range of a regular automatic transmission.) From the driver's seat, all that really matters is that the vehicle is frighteningly smooth: On-ramp sprints feel more like the tingly acceleration of a pocket jet. In fact, the Murano is nearly as quick as both Porsche's new SUV, the Cayenne, and the old standard-bearer, BMW's X5--and it's silkier than either of them.

Historically, CVTs were limited to wee gas misers like the Insight (they can increase gas mileage by more than 10 percent), because the rubber drive belts proved unreliable in engines larger than 1.2 liters. The engineers behind the 3.5-liter Murano solved this by adopting a reinforced steel belt, which works fine, although it's said to be a little balky in temps south of -4 degrees--which might be a problem if you live in, say, Duluth. But then, if you're living in Duluth, you already have plenty of other problems to deal with.

Riding along on 18-inch wheels, absorbing the pleasantly muted thrum of the power train, it's easy to forget that you're in an SUV; the ride feels almost identical to the sporty glide offered by Nissan's Altima, which uses the same platform. Unlike truck-based SUVs, the Murano stays nimble in the swerves, while its stability control keeps any swaying to barely noticeable levels. The interior is un-SUVish too, with clubby leather seats and the expected array of upper-end gewgaws: a 225-watt digital stereo, adjustable pedals, and the best navigation system I've ever seen (the controls are blissfully intuitive, and perspective is rendered three-dimensionally, like a bird's-eye view of the landscape). It's an addictive environment. So much so that when I finally coaxed Mrs. Foil inside the Murano, even she admitted as much. "Well, from in here it's pretty nice," she said. "Can I drive it?"

John Tayman is a contributing writer for Business 2.0.