Nissan Note Reviews

Can you have too much of a good thing? Australians love utes and in recent years we’ve seen more and more brands look to capitalise on that, but it may not be a case of the more the merrier.

Is Toyota preparing two completely different utes to replace the ageing current HiLux in Australia from next year? The first is the widely-speculated but as-yet publicly unconfirmed facelift of today’s eight-generation HiLux, while the second is new-from-the-ground up production version of the EPU (Electric Pick-Up) dual-cab concept that debuted at the 2023 Tokyo motor show.

It’s started again - the talk about how autonomous cars are just around the corner.But are self-driving cars really going to be with us any time soon? Because it feels as though carmakers have been promising autonomous vehicles for a long time now, yet it seems like we’re still no closer to owning a vehicle that can drive us home or to work.Despite this, many car brands think autonomous vehicles are on our doorstep. Is that true? And if so, do we really want to let them in?Volkswagen’s global CEO of Commercial Vehicles Professor Dr Carsten Intra believes they are indeed imminent. “You think that going from combustion to electrification is a big change?” Dr Carsten asked Australia’s auto media last week at the Volkswagen Multivan launch. “And it is, but going autonomous will change our business. This is coming, it's in front of the door. Not just in 10 or 15 years, it will be sometime tomorrow. We are going through the world and testing our fleets in different cities.”Dr Carsten is referring to the fleet of self-driving ID. Buzz electric vans being tested by Volkswagen through its special autonomous company MOIA.Fitted with autonomous tech for full-self driving (but with a human babysitter on board) VW is testing the ID. Buzzes in the United States and Europe. The fleet has just been to Oslo, Norway for winter testing in snow and ice. The self-driving ID. Buzz has a high level of autonomous ability, level 4 actually, a level down from the fully autonomous Level 5 which doesn’t need a human chaperon. This is the level Volkswagen hopes to reach by 2030. These levels from 1 to 5 are just increasingly sophisticated forms of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS). Most new cars are at Level 2 and have systems that can take over steering, braking and acceleration.But Level 5, which can handle any situation without driver input, is much more complicated. While it may work in theory or on a closed circuit, what about on the Pacific Highway in Sydney at 8:30am on a Monday?So with 2030 less than five years away and as a journalist who has written story after story as car company after car company has made promise after promise of autonomous vehicles, I can tell you that the chances of fully autonomous cars driving on Australian roads by 2030 are close to zero.Forgive me for being jaded, but the autonomous car dream is and probably will always remain a dream. I wasn’t always so pessimistic about this. Back in 2016 I was very excited to write a story for CarsGuide about Ford’s bold claim that it was so far advanced into mastering autonomous tech that they’d have self-driving cars everywhere by 2021.“Ford will be mass producing vehicles with full autonomy within five years and that means there will be no steering wheels, no gas pedals and no brake pedals - a driver is not going to be required," Ford’s then global chief Mark Fields announced.Well it’s 2025 and these pedal-less, steering wheel-less driverless cars are nowhere to be seen.Ford isn’t the only one. Most car companies in the past 10 years have said they are on the cusp of autonomous breakthroughs from Nissan, Mercedes-Benz and Audi to Volvo and Hyundai.Well they used to say that and many companies made bold claims, just like Ford’s, that they, too, would have autonomous cars in just a matter of years. But most of the car manufacturers have gone quiet on the topic of self-driving cars. All except Tesla with its so-called full self-driving function which is very likely just advanced driver assistance and not full self-driving. Actually in recent weeks Tesla has had to re-think what it calls its driving system due to regulatory issues in China.Tesla’s claims of having full-self driving modes 10 years ago probably caused the rest of the industry to suddenly work harder and faster on their own autonomous projects only for all of us to reach this point where we’ve discovered that you can absolutely teach a car to drive, but setting it loose on public roads is going to create a multitude of problems from safety and legal to ethical dilemmas. Besides, Volkswagen isn't the first to have fleets testing in cities. Ride-hailing companies such as Waymo have been working on autonomous tech for years only to run into operational difficulties with cars getting lost or even attacked.Until recently Waymo's fleet of autonomous taxis has operated in just the United States with San Francisco, Los Angeles and Austin being the main cities where the service can be found. Now Waymo is going further afield to Japan and is using Tokyo as its first location outsided the US to test the autonomous tech.Waymo will have been testing and operating its fleet of autonomous cars for 10 years in 2026. An achievement in itself and while the technology has come far it hasn't been without inicident. There have been cases where Waymo vehicles have malfunctioned or become confused. Two years ago in Phoenix 12 Waymos all turned up in the same street at the same time and caused a traffic jam, while last year in San Francisco a car park being used to hold dozens of Waymo vehicles erupted into chaos as the empty cars began honking at each other for no apparant reason.Hiccups aside it's truly amazing how well Waymo's fleet of electric Jaguar iPace SUVs can navigate through complicated terrain such as hilly San Francisco with its myriad of streets. Waymo has also recently signed a new deal with Chinese carmaker Zeekr to use its electric Mix people mover in 2025.Volkswagen's own testing with its ID. Buzz fleets will indeed add to the advancement of autonomous tech, too.Progress is slow, however, and for good reason - safety, regulations, ethics and the unpredicatability of other road users present huge challenges for a technology that's expected to be as good, if not better, than humans. Volvo is a safety tech pioneer in the auto industry and one of the first to start developing autonomous systems. But in 2023 Volvo Cars CEO and President Jim Rowan made a startling admission: self-driving cars won’t happen anytime soon.  "So first of all, this big myth that there's five different levels of autonomy is nonsense, in my opinion," he said. "You've got two levels of autonomy. One is your hands on the steering wheel. One is your hands off the steering wheel."Can we drive a car fully autonomous? Yes. Does regulation allow that? No. So I think regulation will be the barrier towards full adoption of full AD more than technology," he said.“Driving inside the city when there's schools and roadworks, and there's a lot of change every day, I think that's a long, long way off.”So if the boss of the company which was so far ahead in developing fully autonomous cars has declared the mission more or less over for now, what’s caused Volkswagen to make its autonomous claims? Well, we’ll have to wait and see but I think we’ll be waiting a lot longer before we start seeing.

Nissan Australia has finally given its ageing Y62 Patrol the update fans have been asking for for years.The big V8-powered off-roader finally gains the interior update that was rolled out in its key market, the Middle East, back in 2021.Aussie buyers have been forced to wait four long years for this upgrade to land.Nissan did add a much-needed 10.1 inch touchscreen to the Patrol a year ago, but that was essentially a head unit replacement that Nissan developed with local company Directed Technologies to bring to the model.This latest interior upgrade will roll out to the regular Patrol Ti and Ti-L, as well as the hardcore Premcar-tuned Patrol Warrior.It’s likely to be the final major update before the arrival of the highly anticipated Y63 Patrol in late 2026.So what does the 2025 Nissan Patrol update usher in?The SUV gets a redesigned centre console and centre stack and the headline feature is a new 12.3-inch digital multimedia display that now sits at the top of the dash.This new screen includes wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto and you can access the menu via buttons on the steering wheel or controls near the screen itself.The new tech helps to modernise the interior of the Y62 Patrol which has been on sale globally since 2010, and Australia since early 2013.It also gains a wireless device charger, a new 7.0-inch digital driver display showing speed, efficiency and nav instructions as well as the Patrol’s 'Off-Road Monitor'.The trim has been given a refresh, too, with the option of a more minimalist black leather-accented layout, or what Nissan describes as a more premium chestnut treatment, featuring woodgrain flourishes on the dash and door and quilted leather-accented seats.Stepping up into the pricier Patrol Ti-L will net you a 13-speaker Bose audio system, a digital rear view mirror and a cooled centre console box.The Patrol Warrior gets all of the cabin updates and also gains black side steps.Nissan has trimmed down the colour palette for the 2025 Patrol but a new ‘Desert Red Metallic’ joins ‘Gun Metallic’, ‘Moonstone White’, ‘Brilliant Silver’ and ‘Black Obsidian’.Pricing has only increased marginally, with the Patrol Ti up by $1340 to $90,600, before on-road costs, while the Ti-L has only risen by $140 to $102,100.The off-road-focused Patrol Warrior is also only up by $140 to $105,660, BOC.In contrast, its Toyota LandCruiser 300 Series rival ranges in price from $96,991 all the way up to $145,791.The Patrol continues to be offered with Nissan’s big 298kW/560Nm Petrol V8 driving all four wheels via a seven-speed auto transmission. It’s also available with Nissan’s new 10-year/300,000km warranty which is conditional on the vehicle only being serviced by authorised Nissan dealers.Nissan is experiencing strong sales for Patrol towards the end of the current model’s life, with 1853 units finding homes to the end of March this year, which is ahead of the LandCruiser’s haul of 904 units.

The Ford Ranger is undergoing an evolution that will see Australia’s best-selling vehicle grow in size as well as scope, as it fends off the coming Toyota HiLux facelift and all-new rivals like the Kia Tasman, MG U9 and next-gen Nissan Navara. These are new niche programs and models that should shore up the current T6.2 architecture’s viability into the next decade for Australia.

Here's our wishlist for the next-generation Nissan Navara

Just days after reports emerged that iPhone-maker Foxconn had secured a deal with Mitsubishi to supply its EVs for the Australian market, the Taiwanese electronics giant appears to be pitching itself to another ailing Japanese automaker.

Will Renault ever put the Austral in Australia?

The interior of the eagerly awaited next-gen Honda Prelude has been revealed thanks to a Japanese YouTuber who has given us a glimpse into the cabin.When the Prelude concept made its debut in 2023 at the Tokyo mobility show it had blacked-out windows so the interior remained a mystery. It’s also highly unlikely it even had a finished interior at that point.Now thanks to Japanese YouTuber Unadon we’ve been given a guided tour inside the two-door 2+2 seater sports car and it's not quite as groundbreaking as we hoped.If anything the cabin, dashboard, controls and instruments are much the same as the cockpit in the current Honda Civic.Sure the new Prelude’s cabin is sporty and the two-tone sports seats with embossed Prelude headrests look modern and luxurious, but the climate control dials, honeycomb mesh air vents and steering wheel will all be familiar to anybody who has bought a Honda in the past few years.The rear seat is more or less a hard grey-coloured featureless bench without any form of obvious lateral support or even moulding for rear passengers.It’s unlikely the back seats will ever house the two people they’re designed to accommodate given the lack of space back there with the heavily sloped roofline and limited legroom. Unadon discovered how cramped it is when we ventured back there. There are also two ISOFIX points if child seats need to be installed.Unadon also gives us a look at the boot under the Prelude's liftback tailgate, revealing a small but deep area behind the rear seats that appears to be about 200 litres in capacity. He also folds the rear seats down to open up even more load carrying space.The Prelude, which is expected to make its European launch by the middle of 2025, will be hybrid only and use a petrol-electric system similar to the unit in the Civic. A manual transmission won't be available either.It's still not been confirmed for Australia, but our fingers are crossed.

The Qashqai has had a mid-life facelift which includes a reshuffled line-up and a new flagship hybrid variant, but is it a winning combination?