New V6 Nissan Patrol – Land Cruiser 300, Or This？

The Nissan Patrol might well be the only car in the world that is designed specifically to excel in sand dunes. But in this film, we're not only going to test it in the dunes. We're also going to put it through its paces over some rocky terrain and on road. We'll get on to all that in a sec. For now, let's give you some basic facts and stats. This is the seventh generation Nissan Patrol, and it's a whopper. 5.2 metres long, over 2.7 tonnes, powered by a pair of V6 engines, the only one you care about being the twin turbo, which develops 419 horsepower and 516 pound-foot of torque, and hurls this gargantuan SUV to 62 in 6.6 seconds. It's four-wheel drive with a low-ratio gearbox and fully independent suspension. No solid beam axle here, like, oh, I don't know. This car's deadliest rival, the Toyota Land Cruiser. Yeah, the Land Cruiser, which has arguably shaped the world more than any other car, looms heavily over the Nissan Patrol. There are plenty of parallels, but basically they've been clashing axles for well over 70 years, since both arrived on the scene in the same year, 1951. A lot of time has passed since then, and the two haven't followed the same path. And on paper, it looks like the Patrol has wimped out compared to the Toyota, given it now uses independent suspension. And where's the innovation? I understand why no diesel, but why no hybrid? And then I realised I have got my perspective all wrong, because I'm looking at the Patrol as a global car, but really it's not. This is a car designed, engineered and developed exclusively for the Middle East. So let's approach it from that perspective, and we're going to start not with romping around the dunes, don't worry, we'll get back to that later, but by driving it on road. Well, this V6 makes a reasonable noise. You hear the little turbo spooling and stuff, and it gives decent performance, much better than the old 5.6-litre V8 did. That was a little bit lethargic, and it's disappeared for predictable reasons. It's emissions and economy. But why is there no hybrid? Well, it's quite an easy one to work out, actually. If you look at where they're going to sell the Patrol, the big markets for it, the Middle East, the USA, Canada, bits of Africa, Australia, these are markets that tend to have cheap fuel and don't care too much about emissions and economy. Where's it not being sold? Europe. At all. Anywhere. It would absolutely ruin those global fleet averages that they have to worry about. Right, it's got a few twisty bends coming up here. Steering's quite well-weighted in this. The car's happy. It rolls a bit, but it's quite happy when it's got a bit of pressure in the suspension. Once you've got a little bit of lean into it, it does hold its line, and the suspension stays composed, which, in a straight line, it doesn't always. This is the thing about this car. I thought it would be a bit more refined and sophisticated, but actually, the ride quality isn't as good as it should be. Those wheels and tyres are really heavy, and they're just getting a bit of jitter back into the chassis. They get shuddered around by the suspension. But overall, it is a more refined and better road car than the new Land Cruiser. But it does have all the toys in here. We've got twin 14-inch screens here, and then a load of stuff down here. Lots of buttons, which is always nice to see. Storage and induction charging. We've got heated and cooled seats and biometric cooling. Apparently, somewhere in here, there are infrared sensors that read your body temperature and decide whether they need to heat or cool you down. But I look at the quality of the fixtures and fittings around here and go, well, it's decent enough, but it's not outstanding. I wouldn't perceive this as a luxury car, but out here, that is completely how it's seen. And that's sort of to do with the fact that these cars are bought by the Saudi royal family and other very important people, and that means that everyone else buys them, too. Because of their sheer breadth of capability in this environment. It's just that it's not as sophisticated as it could be. It doesn't feel as sophisticated as, like, a Range Rover. It feels more like those big, heavy American SUVs, like a Yukon or an Escalade, where you just think it's a very heavy car being forced to do some stuff, and they haven't engineered it to a level that a European company tends to when they really go for it with the stiffening and the chassis control and the smoothness and engineering all of that. This feels like a car that's been done to 80, 90% of that, and then they've gone, yeah, that'll do. Because what they have to concentrate on much more than the finessing of the detail is the reliability and durability of it, because that's where you get your reputation for longevity and everything else that they really need it to have out here. Nissan sells 20,000 Patrols a year in the Gulf states, meaning as many Patrols are sold here as Armadas are in the USA. This is not a recent phenomenon. The market share has built up over generations. Because have a guess where Nissan's first-ever dealership outside of Japan was. Kuwait. That was in 1952, only a year after the Patrol first appeared. And do you know why the Middle East really took the Patrol to its heart? Yes, off-road ability and reliability are right up there, but so, too, is air conditioning. That arrived with the third-generation car and has been fitted to every subsequent Patrol, too. We might take it for granted now, but back then it was borderline revolutionary. Right, moving on, let's see how it copes with clambering over rocks, see if it can walk the Land Cruiser walk. It's so massive, the Patrol. It feels really big. And you just cannot see. We're all off camber here. So I've got to use the see-through bonnet to see where I'm going. And that's pretty effective, actually. Right, there's down one way. Up is going to be more of a test, I think. Let's put the rear diff lock in. Let's see if it'll go up. Rear diff lock's in. The centre diff is like a torsion diff and you can't control that. You can't just lock it. The car decides when it's going to do it. So we're just about at a bit of wheel spin and stuff, making it up and around here. Now I've got to look at the screen again to see where I'm going. And compared to a Land Cruiser on this stuff, it just feels really heavy and a bit more cumbersome. And obviously there's a lot more weight in it and it hasn't got the proper tyres in. But it's simply not as capable off-road as the Land Cruiser 250. It doesn't have the axle articulation, wheel travel or control. Right, let's go and see if we can go and do a silly slope, shall we? Let's hold it in first gear. Low range. Yeah, this is the problem when you don't have a centre diff lock. It's just spinning it all the way. The rears are locked, but it's not going to go up there. What's undoing it up here is the tyres and also how loose that surface is. Because basically, once you start digging down, once you get below that hard top surface, you are in a world of pain and misery. One more try, do you think? There you go, that's how you do it. Just get bounced around a bit, that's all. How harsh does this environment look? I don't know what you were expecting from Saudi Arabia, but I, in my ignorance, was expecting sand dunes and not a lot else. But look at the mountains and this slippery stuff we're on. That's all volcanic. It's amazing. So my question was to myself, does the Patrol look like it was designed for this environment? And I don't think it does particularly. It doesn't quite look rugged and durable enough. I mean, I know it ties in with the old sixth-generation Patrol, but this chrome and stuff looks a bit clumsy and crass. It hasn't got a very strong design language. I know it ties in with the outgoing sixth-generation Patrol, but the chrome is heavy-handed and the design language is fairly bland. At least there's some chunky off-road gubbins around the back. When your towing ball runs out of capacity, you have a Pentel hitch fitted for proper use. And then if we open up the boot, as you'd hope from a very big car, it's got a very big boot. Seats six and seven here, which obviously raise electrically through these buttons, just like they do on one of those Land Cruiser First Editions. But it's huge in the back. It's got a lot of legroom in the middle row, too. And then I wanted to move on and talk to you about this, because, look, off-road kit. In the Middle East, you get an off-road kit with your Patrol. Which includes sand ladders, a tow rope and all sorts of other goodies. How about that? But that's not the best thing going on in here. Throw that to the back. This little bag here contains an air hose. And that's because the Patrol has a built-in compressor. How cool is that? I think it's about time we connected that up so I can go for a bit of a play in the sand. There are worse things to do than mess around in sand dunes in a massive SUV. Right, give it everything. Go on, go on, go on. Yes! Drop the tyre pressures down a bit and it makes so much difference. You can get places you'd never have thought. So when you get into the deep sand and soft sand and you're this heavy, your tyres are basically like rudders, especially the fronts, and they just sort of dig in. And if you hit other people's ruts, you just get pulled into them. And if you get into washboard, ooh, you just get the whole thing shakes and rattles. Listen to it. So, off-road, how does this Patrol feel? Well, I mean, pretty together. Actually, for such a heavy car, it moves around really well. I mean, it's not moving anywhere quickly. It's sort of ponderous in its responses, but, you know, it's doing some fun stuff. You can see why this is so popular out in the Middle East, because it's just so good designed to do it, you see? There you go. That's what you need, isn't it? Right, let's sum it up. Does this new Patrol do the job it needs to do? Yes, and it does it very well. But does it do more than that? No. This is a conservative update designed to make the sort of people who already had an old Patrol buy a new one. If that's you, go ahead, crack on, enjoy. But I can't see it drawing a new audience to the brand, which you can with the new Land Cruiser 250. I know, I know, you'll say it's not the right rival because that would be the Land Cruiser 300, but that's not what I'm driving at. I'm talking about celebrating your back catalogue, because the Patrol's history is every bit as long, varied and interesting as the Land Cruiser's. So why not dip into that and be more adventurous with the design? Bring back the magnificent boxiness of the Y60 and Y61. This is a bit timid, which is a weird thing to say about something the size of a block of flats.