November is the start of the four-wheel-drive season in Victoria's high country as the iconic and extremely tough tracks which close each winter are reopened - a perfect place to test the Nissan X-TRAIL right?
“Wrong!” we hear you say. “The Nissan X-TRAIL is a soft roader used by mums doing the school run,” you add.
Well Nissan was keen to prove otherwise, so they invited Car Showroom to the Mount Hotham Alpine Village and sent us off in an X-TRAIL to tackle the rough, challenging tracks to the Bogong High Plains. These are legendary tracks, revered by Victoria's 14,500 four-wheel-drive club members whose rewards for conquering them are views and scenery the likes of which you will not find anywhere else in the world.
And conquer than we did in our luxuriously appointed TL model Nissan X-TRAIL with its 2.0-litre turbo-diesel engine and six speed automatic transmission. When the traction got questionable, it will be the we simply turned the centre console four-wheel-drive switch to ‘auto’ and the Nissan X-TRAIL had us set to handle the worst of those bush tracks.
What does that mean?
Well clearly it means the Nissan X-TRAIL four-wheel-drive - admirably suited to a softroader’s life for mums on the school run - has a flipside which is tougher than Clint Eastwood's ‘Dirty Harry’.
What it also clearly means is that 110kW/320Nm, 2.0-litre turbo-diesel engine has a very clever torque spread, the suspension articulation delivers lots of wheel travel, underneath there is plenty of ground clearance and of course Nissan's all-wheel- drive system does most of the thinking for you. In fact a check of the stats reveals our TL model Nissan X-TRAIL delivers ground clearance of 209mm, an approach angle of 27-degrees and departure angle of 23-degrees - real soft roaders don't even come close to those sort of numbers.
Inside, the Nissan X-TRAIL TL’s spacious, leather-trimmed interior kept us nicely isolated from the dust, the rocks, the mud, the savage hill climbs and boulder-strewn river crossings we were traversing.
The first Nissan X-TRAIL appeared in 2001 and was a trailblazer for the compact SUV genre. Just like passenger car buyers, SUV customers too are downsizing - this year compact SUVs will account for 40per-cent of segment’s the total sales - and the X-TRAIL combines with its British-sourced sibling the Dualis to give Nissan a dominant sales presence.
Three petrol-powered front-wheel-drive models are the price leaders of the 11- model Nissan X Trail lineup. Starting point is the front-wheel-drive ST model stickered at $28,490, while our Bogong High Plains conquering TL model is listed at 45,240.
Engine choice is a 102kW/198Nm, 2.0-litre petrol, a 125kW/226Nm, 2.5-litre petrol or the 2 L turbo-diesel as tested.
The Nissan X-TRAIL has long been a Car Showroom favourite and our day on the dusty trails around Mount Hotham reminded us not only of its family- friendly interior dimensions and outstanding levels of refinement…but of course it is off-road prowess.
