The new Nissan Patrol and its North American sibling, the Armada, have won an iF Design Award, judged by 129 design experts from 21 nationalities across more than 10,000 entries from 68 countries. The iF awards have been running out of Hannover, Germany since 1954, and while design awards don’t sell cars, they do tend to validate the ones that were already turning heads.
The judging covers five criteria: idea, form, function, differentiation and sustainability. It’s a broad brief, but the new Patrol ticks boxes across most of them in ways the outgoing Y62 simply couldn’t.
What Makes The Y63 Different
The seventh-generation Patrol carries over 75 years of nameplate history, which is a sentence that gets thrown around a lot in press releases but actually means something in this segment. The Patrol badge carries weight in Australia, the Middle East and parts of Africa in a way that’s difficult to manufacture from scratch, something the incoming Chinese brands are discovering in real time.
Design-wise, Nissan has leaned into what it calls “Unbreakable” presence and “Bold Dignity,” which is the kind of language that makes you roll your eyes until you actually see the thing in person. The Double-C lighting signature runs through the headlamps and taillamps, the front fenders get side vents that reference older Patrol generations, and the overall proportions are boxier and more deliberate than the slightly bloated Y62.
Inside, it’s an eight-seat layout with a cockpit that Nissan describes as a fortress of comfort. The emphasis on Japanese precision and material quality is clearly aimed at closing the gap to the Toyota LandCruiser 300 Series, which has owned the “well-built, go-anywhere family hauler” space in Australia for longer than most of us have been alive.
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Australia Is First Cab Off The Rank For Right-Hand-Drive
The detail buried at the bottom of Nissan’s announcement is arguably the most significant for local buyers. Australia will be the first right-hand-drive market to receive the Y63 Patrol, with local launch timing to be confirmed later this year.
That’s a meaningful commitment from Nissan and a signal of how important the Australian large SUV market is to the brand’s global strategy. The outgoing Y62 had a loyal but ageing fanbase here, and sales were never what they should have been given the strength of the nameplate. The LandCruiser 300 and Prado dominated, the Patrol watched from the sidelines, and Nissan knew the product gap was the problem.
The competitive landscape the Y63 is arriving into looks nothing like the one the Y62 launched in. Toyota still leads, but the segment now includes the DENZA B5 and B8 from BYD’s premium arm, GWM’s Tank range, the refreshed Ford Everest, and whatever Mitsubishi eventually does with the next Pajero Sport. Pricing will be critical. If Nissan can position the new Patrol competitively against the LandCruiser 300 while delivering a genuine step up in tech and refinement, there’s a gap in the market waiting to be filled.
No Australian specifications, pricing or exact on-sale dates have been confirmed yet. But the design award adds to a growing pile of early signals that the Y63 is the Patrol that Nissan needed to build a decade ago. Better late than never.
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