Nissan Navara PRO-4X Warrior: Australian demand boosts production

The Nissan Navara PRO-4X Warrior is proving a popular choice with buyers, as soaring demand forces production efforts to ramp up.

Having gone on sale in the middle of last year, the Premcar-modified, off-road focused Nissan Navara PRO-4X Warrior has enjoyed increased demand from the public, with a total of 1251 units built so far – accounting for over one-quarter of all Navara 4x4 sales year-to-date.

It's price point under the Toyota HiLux Rugged X and Ford Ranger Raptor have undoubtedly aided its popularity in Australia, although Nissan admits the increased production from Premcar's Melbourne facility has put extra strain on its supply chain to get Navaras into the country.

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Nissan's Australian managing director Adam Paterson said the marque was more than happy with the response to the second-generation PRO-4X Warrior, with its dealers shifting every example they can get.

"We’re quite excited about that product and how well it’s been doing," Paterson told 4x4 Australia.

"It’s been a hugely successful launch for us; we’ve been selling every unit we can build. We went onsite in September last year and as of the end of last month we had built 1251 Pro-4X Warriors.

"We have sold 1149 of them and the balance of just over 100 are either arriving in dealer lots or just arriving in dealers. We have 180 stores across the country and we have 102 units of stock to deliver so almost every unit is spoken for in advance of production."

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The success of the Navara PRO-4X Warrior has been recognised by Nissan's overseas operations too, although the 25 per cent increase in weekly production has led to supply constraints of base vehicles arriving at Premcar.

"The vehicle has been extremely successful for us, it’s been recognised globally within the Nissan Group as far as how successful the local conversion has been so we’re extremely happy with that.

"We’ve done our best to lift the conversion rate/production rate with Premcar. When we started the program we were building 32 a week and we’ve increased that to 40 per week and that’s what we’re running at now.

"Obviously we need done vehicles to feed the conversion program so that’s really where we can be."

Navara is Nissan's best-selling model in Australia, with the 4226 units shifted to the end of April making up just under half of the brand's overall sales, while it remains the only model to record higher deliveries than last year with a 24 per cent year-on-year increase.