While I love Patrols, the early ZD30 engines were terrible, the last of the run they seem to have fixed things but a 3lt four lugging that load just never did it for me............ you needed to do a lot of mods to keep the engine tip top going by a mate who was a dead set Nissan man ............. I think I would go the 76.
Journey Tow Vehicle. Landcruiser 200 vs Ford Ranger 3.2 Vs Landrover Discovery 4 vs Landcruiser 76
- Thread starter Lozza T
- Start date
Haha I’m heading to my mates farm today to take his 2012 patrol for a drive it has a Brunswick 6.5 litre chev V8 turbo intercooled conversion and I’m pretty sure this is the path I’m going to go down, he paid 37k and it’s really tidy and an auto!! I’m trying to buy it off him with little success so far most of them for sale are manual my knee isn’t up to a manual
Damn interesting, its really difficult after the driving the Jeep for around 220,000K to hop into a truck, even though its the same year model its worlds apart!!
It has a 4" lift and aggressive off road tyres, it has a straight through 4" system which sounds fantastic for the first 10 minutes then begins to get really annoying. This thing drives like a truck, heavy steering, brakes? what brakes? zero HP but heaps of torque but no refinements at all. But in all fairness it apparently has two cracked heads, the owner's F250 had an engine fire when he was towing his van over to catchup with us a a rodeo (long story) so he put it on a tilt tray and towed the van home behind the Nissan, the tow truck went into limp mode up one of the hills and he followed in 1st gear for miles, the temp gauge went up over 3/4. I drove it down to Raymond Terrace to get fuel and coolant was running out all over the place, i called my made and he said don't worry I must have over filled it, so off to Sydney I went. I sat on 120kph all the way down and all the way home, stopped at Raymond Terrace on the way home to refuel it and as I stopped it boiled, luckily for me we were swapping over at the weigh bridge about 10k up the road, I called him and he said keep going, the gauge was going hot then normal. I used 52litres of fuel for 330K almost all M3. So its really hard to say if I love it or hate it, the owner rang Greg who owns Brunswick Diesel and he reckons the previous owner must have over heated it, he said they don't over heat unless a hose came off or he put a hole in something while in the bush, they sell 600 of these engines per year and convert 300 Nissan patrols a year and have been doing it for 33 years he's sending 2 brand new heads over with all the gaskets etc they keep everything in stock.
We did spend a week running around the farm and back roads in a fairly new 79 series GXL duel cab with all the fruit (an optional clock) and personally I couldn't put my family in one. The Jeep is so refined and almost luxurious compare to these two, I need to drive a stock Patrol so see how they drive with out the suspension mods and lift kit etc before I decide where I'm going with vehicles, I like the basic stuff $500 for a set of injectors, can rebuild the motor cheaper than a set of 200 series injectors etc Let me know what you decide I might even buy the Patrol off you and have it converted if you don't want too much for it. Dave