70 years and still going strong – The Nissan Patrol is a true legend
We think of the Nissan Patrol as a legend, but legend is a world often used lightly, so why use it here? How does a car become a legend? The word legend gets thrown around easily after a couple of wins in an off-road race or when it reaches a specific milestone of units built. It cheapens the term and it loses meaning.
So what is a legendary car? Firstly, it must have been around a while. When first built, it would have had to have a certain Wow factor and carried that through its life, decade after decade, generation after generation. You see, the term legend is earned over time. Being great now is lekker, be great over a long time and the word legend comes in.
The Nissan Patrol has been around for 70 years. It was first sold in 1951 when the shattered Japanese economy needed a reliable off-road utility vehicle. Just to prove its point in a very Japanese way, the car drove up the iconic 2500m Mt Fuji. Nissan fiddled with the car for the next few years, and in 1958 it got the Patrol badge.
Now, after 70 years, the Nissan Patrol is still with us, in its sixth generation. In that time more than 2 million Patrols were sold, not bad for what is an expensive car. It has three Guinness World Records, was the first car to cross the murderous Simpson desert in Australia, pulled the heaviest cargo plane, went up the steepest dune in Saudi the quickest ever, and so on.
Those were just the bits that made the news. In the meantime, the rest of the 2 000 000+ Nissan Patrol drivers quietly and without fuss carried on taming the wildest landscapes on earth. From the killer deserts across the Sahara to the barren wastes of Australia, the treacherous ice floes of Greenland to the cloying jungles of the Amazon, the Nissan Patrol was the go-to car for people determined to go there and get back.
The Nissan Patrol could always go wherever you wanted and do so in significant comfort. The 2022 Nissan Patrol model has seven seats and will compare with anything out there in terms of exterior and interior luxury and safety features.
And then, when you look under the bonnet, you will see that V8, ready to take you anywhere. 5.6-litres petrol direct injection, driving 298kW at 5800rpm and 560 Nm at 4000rpm through a seven-speed automatic transmission.
The 2022 Nissan Patrol is a very significant car that comes at a very significant price. You would not buy it before you drove it, but once you have driven it . . .
