Nissan Navara Warrior 2020 review: off-road

I'm Jon Law, this is Chasing Cars, and next to me is the rather tough-looking Nissan Navara N-Trek Warrior. Now this is a pretty cool story, it's a super ute developed to compete with the likes of the HSV Colorado SportsCat, the Toyota Hilux Rugged X, and the sort of the starter of this whole segment, the Ford Ranger Raptor. Now you've already had a chance to check this out with my colleague Tom when he visited the PremCar facility down in Epping, Victoria. Make sure to check out Tom's full detailed walkaround in the link below this video. But basically what's been done is a little bit of exterior massaging, so there's a new bull bar which is specific for this car. It's body colour, hoopless protection, it looks really tough. You've also got a decal kit which looks great as well, and the 40mm lift kit, courtesy of the beefier Cooper All-Terrain tyres and 15mm of body lift. Now the Navara N-Trek Warrior starts at $62,490 for a manual and $64,990 for automatic, which is cheaper than we expected and is seriously competitive in the marketplace it sits in, especially when it offers the unique pulling card of being developed, honed and tested in Australia for Australian conditions, which is pretty awesome. What we're going to do today is have a little poke around the interior and see what's changed compared to the regular N-Trek. We're also going to take it out on a pretty significant drive loop that takes in some of the alpine country's best roads, both sealed and unsealed, and then we'll give you a sort of rundown and a verdict of what we think and how it deals with our conditions, so stay tuned for that. It's going to be a really fun day. Now the interior of the Warrior is largely unchanged from the regular N-Trek model, so a couple of changes are the slightly more orange stitching and the N-Trek Warrior emblazoned on the headrests, the leather-wrapped steering wheel and gear knob remain, and apart from that there's not that much in the way of luxury in here. There's a lot of sort of hard touch materials on the sort of doors and on the dashboard. You do get some pretty decent amenities, so you've got two 12-volt sockets in the front and an extra one in the rear, one USB port and obviously dual-zone climate control, and as standard you now receive the 8-inch touchscreen, which is quite responsive and the infotainment system now comes with Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, which means it sort of brings it up into line with competitors. Although that being said, the lack of digital instrument cluster does sort of let it down amongst some of its other peers at the price, but it can't escape its humble beginnings as a work ute, and the seats are actually reasonably comfortable. The driving position is also pretty sort of car-like, it's not a big ute, you don't feel super high up, so if you're coming from a more passenger car or an SUV it'll feel very very sort of natural to you really, and it's a pretty comfortable place to spend time. Now the back seat of the Warrior is again exactly the same as the regular Navara variants, that means pretty decent headroom, pretty decent knee room behind my own seating position, I'm six foot two so usually I look pretty hilarious in a back seat, but here I don't look too bad I don't think. As well the materials back here are nice, no armrest and no USB charging spots, however there are vents and yeah it's just a generally pretty spacious place to be with a good view out. So what's the N-Trek Warrior like to drive? Well we're out today in the Victorian high country testing that out, and at the moment we're on sort of a fairly green section of track, it's a little bit narrow a little bit dusty but nothing really too testing. Earlier we were on the Blue Rag range track which is a little bit more testing, a couple of steep uphills and we've also had a bit of time on the tarmac as well, and through those tests which sort of encompasses a pretty good indication of say a weekend away that you might take in this car, it's been pretty impressive. Probably the most notable thing about this car over a standard Navara is the way PremCar has reworked the suspension, it's really impressive. They've obviously done a whole new spring and damper package and that means slightly softer springs actually, so six percent softer in the front and eight percent softer in the rear for initial spring rates. The rear now uses a progressive spring rate with a stiffer rear spring in the second part of the travel, the front remains the same but they've added longer bump stops. They've also added new dampers from Teneco and those dampers are both bigger physically and stiffer, so that offers a firmer ride that you notice, you don't sort of bounce around as though it was firm springs, the car just feels so composed. This translates both to off-road which we're on now, it just feels really planted, the faster you go almost the better it feels. As you hit big sort of stutter bumps at speed the recovery pace of the suspension is fantastic, it just really feels like the tyres never will leave contact with the ground and it's just very confidence inspiring. Interestingly on the road as well it's a really good system, so you find that unlike perhaps you'd see in the standard Navara there's actually less body roll from this car, that's from a combination of all the suspension work the Prem car's done and they really haven't made it probably better to drive on the road and a really capable off-roader. Now a couple of the other things that they've tweaked, so the approach angle and departure angle with the sort of slightly different front bar, the bull bar that's now body coloured which looks tough as, they've made a departure angle up to about 38 degrees which is something we've had no issues with today, we've had no scrapes from the front, no scrapes from the underbody with the extra 268 millimetres of ground clearance, it's just been easy really, it's taken what might be sort of quite challenging in a regular Navara and made completely serene. We're sitting here with the aircon on, you know you can play your music through Apple CarPlay or Android Auto, as I mean material quality I've already covered that but it's not the most incredibly pleasant place to be but the seats are very comfortable on this long day out driving, I haven't got sore back at all, it's a fairly pleasant place to be. The gearbox is fine, it's a seven-speed automatic unit, you can opt for the manual as I mentioned earlier for a slightly lower price, we suspect that almost all of the Warriors are going to be sold with an automatic gearbox and it does a good enough job, it also comes obviously with four-wheel drive, two-wheel drive, switchable setting and low range setting which we're in now at the moment and that does a fairly decent job. Manual mode in the auto gearbox sort of doesn't exactly listen to what you tell it to do all the time but that's probably me not being quite as smart as the computer so that's probably a good thing. And the engine, while not a particularly inspiring unit, it's not got the nicest soundtrack, the 2.3 litre twin turbo four-cylinder diesel engine, it certainly does the job, it's got plenty of torque, not any more than you need but not a ridiculous amount either. I suppose it could do with more on some of the steeper pieces of terrain but really it's sort of mid-range in the segment of use where it occupies and it definitely does the job. Fuel economy, we've actually, I mean for what we've been doing it's not too bad, we're currently seeing 14.4 litres per hundred which is, I'd say this is fairly fairly respective of city driving in some senses. The throttle response is doughy but that's what you expect from a diesel automatic and yeah it just gets the job done. Three and a half tonne towing capacity is unchanged from the regular Navara 2 which is cool to see. So basically there's plenty of things on this car that are standard Navara, the steering, the engine, the gearbox is all unchanged as I've mentioned but what PremCar's done is really weaved their magic in the suspension department which is frankly where the standard Navara probably needed a little bit of a hand in this environment and what they've done is created something that is you know usable every day. The NVH is very well suppressed, there's almost yeah imperceptible on the road from the beefier tyres and when you point it sort of off the tarmac onto the dirt you just get a big smile on your face because it it just does everything it needs to do. It's capable, it's enjoyable and it's a great way to enjoy a weekend away and I can totally see why you might use one of these if you live in the city. It's certainly something to consider if you're looking at sort of larger SUVs in terms of you know family carrying capacity but also off-road ability because this will see off pretty much any SUV at this price range while offering similar levels of practicality if you don't mind having an open tray. So well done PremCar, this thing drives very well indeed. Now round to the rear of the Ntrek Warrior. There's a pretty cool story back here. PremCar Engineering actually completely re-engineered the tow bar structure so that they could fit a full-size spare tyre. Now that's pretty cool and it sort of shows the length that PremCar was willing to go to with Nissan to make this Navara a holistic experience. Now we've just wrapped up two days of driving this thing in the Victorian Alpine high country and it's been pretty awesome frankly. It's really surprising how well this car coped with a wide variety of surfaces from a coarse chip black top to smooth dirt roads to corrugated to sort of fairly technical terrain. The suspension package that PremCar has tuned for Nissan is fantastic, comfortable, compliant and yet somehow never gets flustered by big bumps. It's really impressive. As for who the Warrior is for, well given how good it is on tarmac and the infotainment system's been updated it would actually suit a wide variety of people. You could totally have a family with this car, drive it around the city every day, reverse camera makes parking remarkably easy, but really it's for someone who wants to come on adventures like this because it's been an awesome two days here in the Victorian high country. As always, leave a comment down below, tell me what you think of it. I think it looks pretty tough and it's a cool package. 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