Words + Photos By: Daniel Birkhofer
After test driving some limousine and sedan cars, we finally have a real outdoor car to test drive. How do I define an outdoor car? It’s quite simple: leave all the fancy stuff which is not essential and that can potentially break under heavy use, and focus on features to get through the toughest conditions. The Nissan Patrol Pickup is certainly not a car you buy to drive to a seven-star hotel for dinner; it is a rugged purpose-built car which will take you to the end of the world and back.
The Nissan Patrol Pickup has still the old shape from the Patrol Super Safari and didn’t change over the last years. Looking at the car’s body and interior, you directly know which breed it is – not a show horse, not race horse, but a pure-blooded workhorse. The Pickup has no alloy wheels or other eye-catchers added. The body lines are simple and clean. The loading platform is huge even though the wings don’t allow a fully flat floor. The heavy-duty coil spring suspension, incorporating telescopic shock absorbers and a torsion bar, provides confident handling. Top-of-the-class wheel stroke makes easy work of rough roads and unexpected obstacles.
The platform gate is made of metal and also has strong metal hooks on the side to tie up and secure any load.
The interior is kept in neural grey with fabric seats. The only fancy extra is a centre armrest with a built-in cooler to have a cold drink always within reach while you and your car work hard. A basic radio with CD and AUX, as well as power windows and keyless entry system are also part of the basic package.
Since there are not many extras added to the car and it is also only a single carbine two-seater (3 seats), the pickup weighs only 2378kg and you can load almost 700kg to it. The Patrol is powered by a 4.8L six-cylinder engine with 280HP. To drive the pickup on two wheel rear drive is great to save some litres of fuel while on the road. Off the road, the four wheel drive can be engaged in two modes, high and low, and an additional differential look for the back axle can be switched on if needed. Remote areas or long off-road drives are nothing to worry about with the Patrol Pickup since it has an additional fuel tank with 80L totalling to a fuel capacity of 175L.
Driving the pickup on the road is great, you sit high with a good overview to the front. The view to the back is limited by the spare wheel on the loading platform to the rear window and also the B column of the chassis covers the view to the site generating a big blind spot. Adding some blind spot mirrors for 10 AED from the aftermarket would solve this little issue of convenience and overall overview. The big engine accelerates the car in a reasonable time for a 4×4. The car has no traction control and putting the foot on the accelerator in rear two-wheel drive with no load on the rear axle lets the tyres spin easily, especially if there is some gravel or sand on the road. The seats do not have much side support but are very comfortable even for long drives. Inside the cabin there is only very limited loading space behind the seats but you have more than enough space on the loading platform.
The car drives smooth and stable on the road. The nightmare for every 4×4 is soft sand on flat ground, which you find on beaches, but it was a piece of cake for the Patrol Pickup. With temperatures still around the 30s at night, I decided not to pitch the tent and sleep on the loading platform on my mattress. For everyone who hasn’t tried it before, sleeping on the back of your pickup on the loading platform provides you with a perfectly even floor ensuring a good night’s sleep with all the comfort you can find outdoors. Since I was travelling alone, I could even keep all my fishing gear and other stuff on the loading platform and found enough space for my outdoor bed. Therefore packing up in the morning was done in a record time of less than five minutes.
After the good performance on the beach, I wanted to check the performance of the car in the desert. I’m generally lazy and don’t deflate the tyres for a little drive in the desert until I feel it is necessary to do so. For the test drive, the car wasn’t loaded which increased the performance due to the light weight, so it was not necessary to deflate the tyres for the little dune drive. Since the car performed so well, I also didn’t manage to put the car in a situation where the differential lock was needed. Compared to the 4×4 I’m usually driving, the lightweight pickup was great to drive in sand and I would wish to drive it for my next long desert trip.
Blessed with the long Eid weekend, the next test was the loading capacity with big outdoor gear like paddle boards. Usually, I need to lift the board on the roof rack of my 4×4 which is 190cm up. Loading the boards on the pickup was so much more convenient and again the loading platform provided enough space for all the equipment. With all the sand in the region, it’s great that you can use the loading platform as a working platform away from the sand. Everyone who spent some time in the outdoors, would have had the experience of dropping things in the sand and never finding them again. Having such a huge working platform minimizes this risk.
Verdict:
The Nissan Patrol Pickup is a purpose-built car for farmers, camel herders, etc, withstanding the toughest condition, keeping maintenance at a minimum and durability at a maximum. These are all great properties for an outdoor car. The downside is certainly the lack of comfort and fancy design or technical features which you will find in other pickups popular in the consumer market like the Ford F-150 or GMC Sierra. So the Nissan Patrol Pickup is definitely a car without compromises, an indestructible workhorse, a car which will still keep going even after hundreds of thousands of kilometres with off-road challenges. In-between all the fanciness and bling of the city, I enjoyed driving the Patrol Pickup very much on and off the road. No makeup, just pure off-road capability. It would be definitely within the handful of cars I would personally drive for all my outdoor needs.
