You see off-road vehicles everywhere these days. Everywhere, that is, except off the road. Thundering across fields remains the preserve of a small band of well-built, farm-ready workhorses with indestructible axles. Meanwhile, our streets throng with workshy 4x4 derivatives, hellbent on giving the impression that, in another, less valeted life, they would be backing up a mud-chute, and that fate has set them the task of the school run instead. Clearly, the closer a family car resembles a cross between a combine harvester and a rocket launcher, the happier today's families are.
Exuding something of the Korean war, and something else of the barn dance, the Nissan X-Trail is typical of the modern kind. It was launched less than two years ago, but it's already back with a bunch of new ideas hammered on, including, in the model I drove, a new 2.2-litre turbocharged diesel engine, which chunters and grumbles like a taxi at tick-over, but is smooth and powerful once you get under way, having checked your blockbusting rear-view mirror and the settings on your DVD-driven satellite navigation system. It's one of those that offers a bird's eye view of the streets receding to a strip of blue sky on the horizon, only increasing your already vivid sense that you are involved at some level in a covert bombing mission.
Technically speaking, the X-Trail falls into the compact MPV category, but in most directions there is nothing very compact about it. In keeping with sports utility vehicles everywhere, it appears to have been designed in consultation with an advisory panel including Stormin' Norman Schwarzkopf and the CEO of Tonka. Its bumpers are so big they appear to have their own bumpers. It has windscreen wipers the thickness of drainpipes. It has a new mesh grille, for that "just crashed through a chicken run" look. You could put up a deckchair and sunbathe in the space between the top of the wheel and the wheel arch. There will be a rear gun turret available as an optional extra from the summer of 2005. Probably.
Best of all, the new X-Trail has a pair of "safari lights" mounted in the ends of the roof rails. Lights on the roof: how United Nations is that? They only activate on full beam, but even so. "Come out of the car with your hands above your head!" When you flash that sales rep in his Vauxhall Vectra for cutting you up on a roundabout, he's going to know about it. In fact, he's going to think an office block is after him.
Within, you get a six-speed gearbox and a three-way button to alternate the drive system according to whether you are trying to go vertically up a cliff or merely dropping off the babysitter. Handy, though one has to concede that, generally in today's SUVs, the drive-shift button is as redundant as a Christmas tree salesman at this time of the year. The chances are you'll do what I did and lazily leave it in all-road mode the whole time, allowing the car's electrics to make up their own mind about whether to switch between two-wheel and four-wheel drive.
The fact is, if you had heavy work to do, you wouldn't be looking at an X-Trail in the first place. You'd be buying a Nissan Patrol, which can sustain an impact from a cruise missile without losing speed or changing direction. The X-Trail is most definitively a "soft-roader", to use the marginally derisive term. You know this because the new model features not a newly devised holster for a bolt gun, but rather a glove compartment that can be used both to keep things cool and to warm them up. Say farewell to cold curry misery.
This is by no means to imply that the X-Trail feels scantily put together or without sinew, nor that all its body panels will drop off as soon as you bump its reconfigured alloys up on to a kerb. In fact, overall the car feels fairly muscular, kick-proof and scuff-resistant. In a head-to-head mountainside collision with a goat, I have no hesitation in beleiving the goat would come off worse, which wasn't automatically my assumption in one of the X-Trail's price-competitive rivals, the Hyundai Terracan. But the goat would leave a nasty scratch on the paintwork, and as the owner of a new X-Trail, you probably wouldn't want that. Better to keep off the goats altogether.
It's not that the X-Trail couldn't plausibly, if asked, get you from one end of a valley to the other using only the riverbed, while no fewer than three labradors try to keep their footing in the wipe-clean cargo area. It's rather that it knows you have no intention of asking it to. Or not more than once a year, anyway, following some map confusion while on holiday in Scotland. Otherwise you will be pottering about in it just like people in non-armoured cars, except more confidently and from a higher driving position. And when the parking gets tough in an out-of-town shopping facility, you'll be glad you bought an X-Trail.
The lowdown
Nissan X-Trail 2.2 dCi Turbo
Price: From £18,300
Top speed: 110mph
Acceleration: 0-62mph in 11.5 seconds
Consumption: 39.2mpg (combined)
At the wheel: Robson Green
On the stereo: Blue
En route for: Bluewater
