The car we had was a Nissan Primera. 4 door hatchback. It was quite fancy and even had airconditioning (which we actually used on several occassions). We rented from Alamo and they advertise a group B sized car with automatic transmission. When I check now the presentation of information has changed, but I think the original was like an Opel Astra 1.6 (compact). It was the least expensive aoutmatic available. When we got there they didn't have one so we got an upgrade to the next size automatic (3 levels as they put it). I think that was classified as a ''standard' size, Opel Vectra 2.0 or equivalent.

The Primera was OK, and the transmission was very smooth, but it had strange and inconvenient goals. Here Karen and I have cheap cars with 3 speed automatics (fancier/newer cars have 4 speed, and I see real fancy ones even have 5 speeds) with torque converter lock-up. Maybe the Primera was so smooth I couldn't tell what it was doing. With our cars, especially Karen's with the 16 valve OHC, if you get on it and want to go(!), they quickly downshift and let the engine rev to 4 or 5 K + and you are off. Each of the gears can be manually selected for engine braking or special circumstances.

The Primera had two forward selctions. There was also a "Sport" setting. I'd expect sport to raise the shift points, but what it seemed to so was lock it in an intermediate gear. There was a tach, and I never observed any shifts (up to about 60 mph) in that mode. It did provide engine braking. Other than around towns I didn't find any convenient way to use sport mode.

In regular mode the goal seemed to be to minimize the engine RPM's. I have never seen engines of that size run at such low speeds. Just driving around, starting up, or going around roundabouts, it would end up in a gear that made the rpm about 1400 with little oomph to get going. This is about the time the rest of the traffic is moving out pretty good and you end up in their way. To get its attention, which wasn't instantaneous by any means, you really had to put your foot into it and they you ended up with too much go. Also, in regular mode, as high as it would rev was about 3800-4200 rpm even though the red line was over 6K (the engine seemed to have lots of OHC and probably a  zillion  valves).

The single "Lo" selection was probably OK of the UK. It locked the tranny into its lowest gear. This would be OK for decending a short steep grade, which seem to abound in the UK. Over here we have few of those but many longer (like miles) grades for which that low is too slow, but 2 nd or 3rd (in a 4 speed) would let you use engine braking at 30 or 40 mph if you could select them.

The Primera also had a lot of electronic selections (fan speeds, modes of instrument  displays) that were not intuitive. Its like they let the electrical/computer engineers loose with no instructions on making things easy to use. I had to read the manual to get the clock to display while we were driving. I'm not sure information on how far the car thinks it can go before it needs gas is useful to me if I have a fuel guage.

Recently I came across as Nissan Maxima in a lot here. It looked a lot like the Primera. I not much of  Nissan affectionado, but it was a  close as I've seem. Just for reference.