A change of role
The frameless monocoque Pathfinder may not seem as tough as the old one, but it’s more talented in real life and heads a range of five Nissan crossovers that line up in the showroom like a row of Russian dolls, writes Dave Moore.
BY THE end of this year, Nissan will have a choice of SUVs and multipurpose vehicles more extensive than any other maker. It all starts with the wee Juke at the bottom end, a quirky, likeable 1.5-litre CVT four that gets its first facelift in a few months.
Next up are the Qashqai and X-trail which share a C/D platform and get a complete redesign and repositioning this year. The new Qashqai will be a five-seater only but with the same seven-seat wheelbase for massive loadspace, while the X-trail gains seven seats this time around and will offer the tougher AWD powertrain for trail drivers.
Then there’s the Murano, which goes into its third generation soon, but still looks good in series II guise. It drives well, as it should with Nissan’s Z-sportscar V6 engine doing the work, again with a CVT transmission. It too is a four-wheel-drive lifestyler rather than life-changer. At the top of all this, is Nissan’s new Pathfinder, the seven-seat range-topper of the line-up.
It too runs the 3.5-litre Z-car V6 with a creamy-smooth CVT and it’s designed to appeal to a new Crossover/SUV customer, who doesn’t exactly require a truck, but may well tackle something a bit more intrepid than shopping and the school run on occasion.
In order to create the new Pathfinder, Nissan in the US focused on what wasn’t needed in the new car as much as what was.
Previously the Pathfinder was effectively a station wagon based on the trusty Navara ute, offering diesel and petrol power and a full ladder frame.
Being built in and for the US, the new Pathfinder from Alabama eschews the weight, complexity and space-sapping tendency of a ladder chassis so that it is as much a people-mover as a crossover per se, and it’s no coincidence that Ford has gone through the exact same exercise with its Explorer, which is now a transverse front or all-wheel-drive prospect with more room for up to seven or eight people than its rather cramped predecessor.
The prospect of a load-bearing monocoque also means that crossovers built this way can achieve sedan-like impact safety standards, which is something that trucks in the US don’t by law actually need to offer now, though they will, soon.
Visually, the new Pathfinder has lost the square-rigged style of the old model, replacing it with a softer wagon-like profile, with nicely blistered wheel-arches and 18-inch alloy rims on every version. It’s all capped-off at the front with a square chrome intake grille that offers a nod to its truck-based predecessor. It’s gentler on the eye, and the family and the dog took a liking to it immediately. If our dog doesn’t take to a car she has to be picked up and lifted in, with the Pathfinder, Ruby just cleared its tow-bar in a single bound.
So it does look different. Inside the effect is immediately obvious, the seven-seat cabin has an airiness that the old car never had, the rearmost seats were easier to use and stow and appeared to be built for big people, not just children, which we guess is something else we can thank the car’s USsourcing for – the ‘‘Burger Percentile’’ and all that.
The Tuscaloosa sourcing ensures that all our Pathfinders are loaded with equipment, though you don’t get sat-nav in any of the three models on offer. The range consists of two and
four-wheel-drive versions of the ST model at $54,995 and $59,990 respectively, with a flagship Ti model rounding things off at $65,990.
Every car gets seven allAmerican seats in three rows, front and rear air-conditioning units, eight-way power driver’s seats, a seven-inch colour touch-screen (handy, even if you can’t use it for sat-nav), voice recognition, bluetooth streaming, a two-gig hard drive and compatibility with most ways of making music, tyrepressure monitoring and a reversing camera.
The loaded Ti model fronts-up with luxurious leather, heated front seats, power adjustability for the front passenger chair, power adjustable steering, foglamps and a power sunroof.
It has to be said that we’d trade the sunroof for sat-nav any day.
The dash layout is simple and easy to follow and even an old bloke like the motoring editor was able to set and forget every music, radio and phone connection without resort to a handbook.
Nissan has gone wholesale with CVT transmissions and while many journalists more gung-ho than me don’t like them, I can’t think of a Nissan from the Pulsar right up to the Pathfinder that would be better without such a system.
In terms of refinement and quiet cruising, nothing comes close and while a slightly different throttle technique is required – a gradual squeeze, rather than a drag-racer’s stomp – it really isn’t a trial to relearn the way you drive in a crossover this nice.
At 100kmh the CVT allows the Pathfinder to murmur along with barely 1500rpm on the clock and even adjusting my perception of real speed on my GPS against the optimistic speedo, this is a relaxed and sumptuous car for the long haul.
It doesn’t so much burst into accelerative urge when you drive it properly, it sort of zooms, quietly, past with getting within 2500rpm of troubling the tachometer’s redline.
This probably explains why our computer readouts of fuel consumption were better than the combined factory figures of between 9.9L and 10.2L for 100km. The car dropped below 9L on long runs and seldom went over 10, or perhaps we’re too gentle.
The 350Z donated engine is flexible and responsive if not the smoothest in the business, but nobody bought the sports car for refinement, did they?
While the new Pathfinder is no mud-plugging rock-hopper, it makes a good fist of trails and river banks – as long as you walk them beforehand with a big stick.
Where it does score over the old car however, is with its pushbutton ‘‘Tow Mode’’ which resets the transmission control module so that it suppresses upshifts (or hunting between ‘‘steps’’ on the CVT) on uphill drives with a heavy load on behind.
Also, when starting off the control module will hold the CVT in a lower step to assist step-off with the trailer in tow. It also assists enginebraking by controlling the ambient step-selection on the CVT to help hold things back on steeper downgrades.
We’d like to see such a system included on other vehicles likely to do some towing.
We used it for the regular trailer-to-the-dump run and found that with the Tow Mode button selected, progress was smoother and with less fore-and-aft ‘‘clunking’’ at the tow-ball.
We were surprised how nimble the Pathfinder was on the road. In the context of the market for which it was mainly designed, the Nissan is often catalogued under ‘‘Sports SUV’’ – forgive the redundancy, here – and compared to the hig boys and indeed the truck based old Pathfinder, its behaviour on twisting routes and often pockmarked curves is lissom and enjoyable, with none of the off-line nudges possible with cruder chassis.
Nissan has made the right decision with its change of role for the Pathfinder.
Spec for spec it’s the same price as a hard to sell Australian family six, with more seats and more talent and with no detectable trade-off in fuel consumption.
Having said that, we’d like to see the car with a diesel option, preferably the Renault-derived turbo V6 550Nm unit used on the ultimate Navara ute.
Who knows, if the burgeoning Nissan/Infiniti/Renault consortium sees a niche for Pathfinder in eastern Europe – a fast-growing market – that could happen.
But don’t hold your breath, Nissan has the conundrum of supplying us with a Ti model with the big sunroof removed and sat-nav in the dash for a little less than the $65,990 being asked for the top model at the moment.
First World problem, eh?