Nissan X-Trail ST five-seat 2026 review

There’s plenty of evidence that, in the current era, Japan is opting to continue along a consciously traditional and measured car-making lane, rather than the rapid-fire, showy, tech-bloated, churn-and-burn that China is so conspicuously trailblazing.

Japan likes techy, forward-thinking ethos, too. It’s just that evidence is mounting that, for Nissan – like Toyota, Mitsubishi, Mazda, Honda and Subaru – bleeding-edge motoring is worth some exploration, but its bread and butter is better served with dollops of tradition and convention because, in the volume-selling mainstream, so many global buyers have traditional and conventional tastes.

Naturally, a shallower, more measured trajectory with motoring evolution is, in itself, Japanese motoring tradition. Which is why for every new(-ish) school electric Ariya – a model China can quickly overpower and undercut on price in lightning-quick turnaround – there’s an X-Trail or 10, a product China has little answer for.

And for every petrol-charged electric e-Power – inaccurately call it ‘hybrid’ if you must – there’s a still-beating, uncomplicated, internal-combustion X-Trail option in waiting, like a trusted old friend, fighting off impeding emissions legislations while it can.

In many ways, the 2026 Nissan X-Trail ST remains a torchbearer for old-school Japanese ethos: simple pleasures, well-honed fundamentals under the skin, quality in core DNA, while offering not everything you might want but covering off so much of what you actually need.

It has just five seats, two front driven wheels, and no electrified drive. But at $38,305 list, or around $42,500 on road with standard paint, it’s cheap – easily the cheapest Nissan-badged SUV given the smaller (newer, slicker) Qashqai e-Power doesn’t enter the room under $50K drive-away.

Suitably, there are more seats, driven wheels and the aforementioned e-Power powertrain tech if you spend up in the X-Trail range, so it’s easy to presume that the unassuming ST is some poverty pack – one that cuts significant or crucial corners in specification to arrive at its handsome price point. It does nothing of the sort.

Standard gear includes full-LED exterior lighting, 17-inch alloys, auto wipers, power-folding mirrors, proximity lock/unlock, ‘global’ remote window opening, e-brake, 12.3-inch touchscreen media with wireless phone mirroring, 7.0-inch TFT driver’s screen, six-speaker audio with DAB+, four USB-C outlets, cloth trim, etcetera.

Some nice touches, if nothing overtly fancy, and aside from its urethane steering wheel (more below), the ST is well-rounded and certainly far from skimpy with features.

But you do discover – as the Chasing Cars team did in our $40K SUV Megatest forensic deep dive – that the basic X-Trail really does impress in a good, old-fashion quality experience that has little to do with a bells and whistles count.

How does the X-Trail ST drive?

While 135kW is far from pulse-racing, it belies the surly, broad-shouldered 244Nm shove from a large-capacity, direct-injection 2.5-litre petrol four. The sheer response is, initially, quite surprising.

Better yet, its marriage in calibration to the CVT transmission is, like much of the rest of the X-Trail, polished and well sorted. There’s an impressive amount of refinement in this powertrain, enough guts to set the front wheel chirping if you like, and enough snot to get you and your family out of harm’s way if need be.

The X-Trail does, like the technically related Mitsubishi Outlander, feel quite significant on the road: some of it size and outward vision, some of it in a genuine sense of solidity in the build. And because it’s not paired with a high-boosted small-capacity engine, it feels suitably substantial.

What’s not like the Outlander, or the dynamically wayward previous generation X-Trail put to pasture back in 2022, is the fantastic chassis tuning of the current gen’s brand-shared Alliance CMF-CD platform.

As exemplified in our medium-SUV Megatest, the petrol X-Trail packs one of the finest ride and handling packages in the mainstream, even with – or perhaps due to – its lean front-drive configuration.

The steering is wonderfully clear and direct, and suspension compliance is deftly measured. Nissan’s SUV is an organic, comfy, fuss-free and easy-to-drive experience tooling around the suburbs or cranking out the open road kilometres on cruise control. It’s effortless.

The chubby 17-inch rubber does wonders for smothering the finer stuff and polishing up the ride comfort. The only real flubs evident are over nasty and sharp shopping-centre speed humps, where the ride gets a touch brittle and hardware below gets a little noisy.

Find a backroad and its advantages over the Mitsubishi, and so many other bread-and-butter family haulers, conspicuously comes to the fore. Pushed on, the X-Trail is fluid and composed, bringing bona-fide enjoyment for the keen punter and utmost confidence for those who aren’t.

So despite feeling substantial at a cruise, its character is tighter and keener than most of its competitive set when the going gets twisty. Its surprisingly lithe nature is surely down to its lean 1535kg weighbridge ticket, born out of not only deft chassis tuning at play but by its front-drive simplicity.

Of course, improved grip (and 2000kg towing) and frugality (with an e-Power drivetrain) is found when splashing out further up the X-Trail grade tree, but that’s not to degenerate what is an impressively well-sorted drive for what is.

This translates to safety. The ST fits a broad array of active driver assistance systems and covers off all key essentials: you only graduate to features such as PilotPro conveniences and 360-degree camera coverage stepping up to the ST-L grade.

And despite the presence of speed recognition and driver monitoring – the blight of modern-day motoring annoyances, particularly in Chinese and Korean rivals – the X-Trail’s ADAS is calibrated well enough that nothing demands switching off frequently due to over enthusiasm.

How is the X-Trail ST’s interior?

Good space, sound ergonomics, logically located physical buttons for key feature adjustment, plenty of soft-touch surfaces, straightforward media screen menus, pleasing cloth seat trim, oodles of storage – the X-Trail ticks the important boxes, all minted with solidity in greys brooding enough to feel classy rather than cheap.

Off the bat, the ST interior starts winning you over with charming simplicity and sheer user-friendliness, in areas beyond the presence of fancy window dressing or frilly, techy accoutrements. Everything is pleasingly simple and straightforward, with no learning curves to climb or silly, hidden usability Easter eggs you’re forced to unearth.

It’s really the combination of the comfy, contoured seats, the natural ventilation of the quality cloth trim, and the soft-trimmed dash fascia and door-card tops that makes the ST feel more premium than its price point might suggest. And the wheel is so nicely styled and contoured that you don’t immediately notice it’s urethane.

Ther X-Trail is roomy, too, though the dark theme, the rising dash and low-set seating conspire to make it feel larger and heftier than some of its rivals that offer a lighter and leaner ambience. Six-way mechanical seat adjustment with (limited) two-way electric lumbar is, like much of the SUV, useful if nothing overly fancy.

The driver’s screen is a collision of ye-olde analogue dials and a newer, configurable 7.0-inch TFT colour screen, and it gets away with it – possibly the key area that really drags the vibe into yesteryear.

But both the driver’s screen and the more contemporary-looking 12.3-inch panorama-type media display are quite bright and offer easy-to-read contrast in their skin, foregoing the trendy grey-on-white themes favoured in a good many Chinese SUVs that are blinding at night and illegible for anyone with iffy eyesight in any situation.

The media system is hardly the last word in slickness and processing speed, but nor does it feel too behind the times. Perhaps the main annoyance is that, without inductive phone charging in a format that supports wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, you’ll probably tether your phone to a USB-C outlet anyway.

Big, clear, friendly air-con controls are a huge win: no fancy dual-zone climate, but with the straightforward interface and rear passenger air vents, it’s not realistically left lacking.

Speaking of row two, the X-Trail’s rear doors open to almost 90 degrees, revealing huge door apertures and excellent access to the rear seats for loading in small kids or fitting their seats or capsules.

The second row is roomy, quite light and airy thanks to the large side glass area, and the rear bench seatbacks allow a couple of different rake adjustment positions to tune in comfort. There’s ample space for three adults, though the seat is contoured heavily towards the outboard positions, making the centre position less than ideally comfy.

Yes, you can stump up $3000 extra for the all-wheel drive that brings an added row of seating, but the X-Trail’s form makes for fine, roomy five-seat packaging (with 585 litres of boot space) or a cramped seven-seater not fit for adults in the rear (with smaller 465L of boot space). It’s a case of choosing your poison.

It’s a nice, broad, usable boot as a fiver, while leaving enough room for a space-saver spare under its flat floor.

What are the X-Trail ST’s ownership costs?

If there’s a compromise in opting for the low end of the X-Trail range, it’s that the naturally aspirated 2.5 four will hit you in the hip pocket with consumption. On the open roads we saw sevens – it’s 7.3L/100km combined claimed – though stop-start urban driving shoots up closer to double figures in the real world. At least it happily runs on cheapy 91RON fuel.

Servicing costs $1995 for a five-year bundle, with intervals of 12 months or 15,000km. Keep servicing through Nissan and the warranty can be extended to a whopping 10 years, though capped at 300,000km.

Budget Direct told us the median annual premium purchased for the first time between 1/5/25 and 1/5/26 to comprehensively insure a new Nissan X-Trail was $1344. Individual circumstances and policy terms may vary.

Of course, everybody’s situation is different, and the premium will vary according to make and model, and other things insurers take into account, such as your postcode, driving history, who drives the car, where you garage the car and more.

Please quote for yourself. Subject to meeting underwriting criteria. Insurance issued by Auto & General Insurance Company Limited. See PDS & TMD at budgetdirect.com.au.

The honest verdict

Three years ago, reviewing the MY23 ST-L, yours truly wrote: “There’s really not much new or benchmarking that the petrol-driven X-Trails bring to the midsize SUV segment”. In growing hindsight, I was kinda-sorta wrong.

The X-Trail’s virtues are its simple, straightforward, approachable and flaw-free nature. And demonstrated most handsomely in basic five-seat guise. It’s where the quality of the core product is demonstrated at its purest.

These qualities we’ve also raved about in the new Mazda CX-5: achingly old-school ways and yet so good…perhaps largely because of it.

Increased fanciness and complexity doesn’t benefit fundamental motoring quality, nor compensate for a lack thereof. This is becoming increasingly evident in the tidal wave of poorly executed, flawed and frustrated price-busting SUV options flooding onto the Aussie market.

The X-Trail ST’s pure, unassuming nature, while covering off essential needs, makes it the thinking buyers’ price-buster at the price it lands for. It’s an easy car to recommend highly, even when cross shopping against fancier variants further up the X-Trail tree.