Our Patrol LE has been chugging along perfectly fine, but it’s not had much use ever since we bought the Chrysler 300 SRT a few months ago. While we were still getting over the euphoria of buying Mopar muscle, our Patrol went in for service in May.
The Nissan Pathfinder has had a long and varied life. In its first generation, it was a five-seater body-on-frame compact offroader back in 1985. Since then, it switched to a unibody, body-on-frame, and then again to a unibody in its current generation, this time fully becoming a crossover with seating for seven in 2013. The model has now received a makeover for 2018, and we drove it at the media launch event in Fujairah.
It’s been about a year since the Nismo version of the Patrol took the UAE by storm. A sporty version of a legendary body-on-frame offroader? It was never done before. But it’s proven to be a successful concept, to the point where numerous non-Nismo Patrol owners took to the aftermarket to turn their regular versions into Nismo lookalikes. Oddly enough, we never got the chance to drive one for whatever reason, so finally asked for one. We were given the car that appeared in the TV ads, complete with non-standard shabab tint.
Nissan rolled out the single and crew cab versions of its full-size Titan pickup a few months ago for the American market. At the 2017 Chicago Motor Show, they added a King Cab version to act as an intermediate option.
Here are the recalls that occurred during the month of February.
The Y61-generation Nissan Patrol, still on sale in select markets including the UAE after the new Y62-generation came out in 2010, is getting a second life in the GCC, even as it is being phased out elsewhere. There will now be a top trim level called the Nissan Patrol Super Safari in the Middle East.
This may sound a bit ridiculous initially, but Nissan Middle East has just announced a new concept to “revolutionise the way vehicles are evaluated for desert performance.” Developed by Nissan engineers over the past two years, Desert Camel Power uses a “scientifically proven formula to determine, in an accurately measurable and reproducible way, how a given vehicle will perform in typical desert off-road conditions.” It’s been a while since we graduated from engineering school, so we’ll just publish the specifics as told by Nissan.
Nissan invited us to a “surprise” launch event in Dubai, only telling us that it will be a crossover of some sort. That crossover turned out to be the 2018 Nissan Kicks. The more surprising news was that it will replace the Juke crossover and the Tiida hatchback in the carmaker’s GCC line-up, even though these cars will continue to be on sale in other markets such as Lebanon and Jordan.
It’s hard to believe that the R35-generation Nissan GT-R has been around for almost a decade. So long, in fact, that it’s creator Kazutoshi Mizuno has already retired and chilling on a beach somewhere. But development of the car continues, as a new version debuted late last year. We finally got a chance to get behind the wheel of the latest version, if only briefly, at the Dubai Autodrome.
At the end of every year we do a rundown of how we’re doing and what were the highlights of the past year. Admittedly, 2016 has been tough on many people, with the downturn in the economy leading to job losses and a 30% decrease in car sales. This was reflected in our traffic statistics, which has always been a window into the local car market. However, we still managed to eke out a 5% increase in revenue, and still remain the most profitable automotive portal in the region (despite increased costs in “fees” and unfavourable rules) thanks to our genuine readers,