This Nissan X-Trail will be able to cope with more than a school run.
Nissan is seemingly going mad for concept cars with a slew of fresh metal destined for the Tokyo Auto Salon in January, including a jacked-up version of the X-Trail called the “Crawler Concept”.
Unlike the wacky ‘Hyper’ series of concepts that the Japanese firm revealed at the Tokyo Motor Show in October, the five concepts due to be at January’s event will be based on current production models.
The X-Trail Crawler Concept has only been lightly teased with a shadowy image. We can see the car’s LED headlight signature and that’s about it for the production-level distinguishable features. There’s a huge amount of ground clearance afforded by raised suspension and beefy off-road tyres and on the roof there are nine individual LED light clusters on the front of a roof rack.
Nissan says the Crawler Concept “has a boosted off-road flavour and gear toughness. The exterior represents a world of rock-crawling, running through steep and rough terrain, and the luggage area contains the tools that have always been looked for in the X-Trail.”
Given the focus on off-road capacity, we expect the Crawler Concept to use the four-wheel drive powertrain of the standard X-Trail, rather than the lesser-powered front-wheel drive set up. That would mean 157kW from a dual-motor configuration and a 1.5-litre petrol engine.
What we don’t expect is the X-Trail Crawler Concept to make production or even preview a production car in the same way the Hyper Adventure concept did – despite that car’s wild design.