Category: Small 4x4s 
Price Range: £19,245 to £26,795
Quality, looks, decent performance.
Freelander has better image; not much else.
Comfort upgrades make this a serious threat to Freelander's market domination.
The 2004 X-Trail has different seats from earlier models, with better under-thigh support thanks to longer seat bases - both cloth and leather seats remain comfortable over distance. However, height adjustment would be useful on the electric, leather seats, especially for shorter drivers. The ride is comfortable, but deals with small undulations and bumps better than it soaks up larger potholes. Wind and road noise are acceptably suppressed. It's probably a shade more comfy than a Freelander, about on a par with a CR-V, and better than a RAV4.
There's plenty of room in the front for the tallest occupants to get comfortable, even if a sunroof is specified. And even with the front seats in their rearmost position, most people will find there's enough rear kneeroom. The boot holds 410 litres to the window, and unlike the earlier X-Trail, there's a standard luggage net on the boot floor. The seats split and fold into the floor to leave a flat load bay, which is very handy; the luggage space then increases to 1,841 litres.
Base SE models get a single-slot CD player in the dashboard. Sound quality is reasonable and there are four speakers. Sport boosts that number to six, and adds steering wheel controls and a CD changer in the dashboard. T-Sport models pick up Nissan's DVD satellite navigation system, which is very good and comes with the clever Birdview option, where your path is mapped out on screen as if you were following yourself at a few hundred feet in a helicopter. The stereo quality remains the same with sat-nav, but the screen's intrusive size only allows for a single-slot CD player in the dash.
Latest Readers' Drives About the Nissan X-TRAIL
wrote on 30 12 2007
wrote on 18 10 2007
wrote on 31 07 2007